NIR software identifies food fraud

Identifying food fraud and improving ingredients and recipes traceability are long-standing issues in the food sector. To address these, Chemometric Brain, a Cloud based software solution, has been launched.

Chemometric Brain is a unique quality control system based on a Near Infrared technology (NIR) to guarantee the traceability, suitability and homogeneity of ingredients and food products, especially in recipes containing multiple ingredients.

Near Infrared can be applied to many types of samples including powders, solids, gels and liquids and provide a consistent identification and comparison against other samples. As a result, this will increase a company’s food-safety standards and establish a precise and fully replicable quality-control process. This solution can be used to identify raw materials, detect possible changes in suppliers’ processes, ensure the exact mixture composition, better determine the expected product shelf-life or analyse physical-chemical properties, among others.

The major difference between NIR solutions already available and Chemometric Brain is that this is the only software in the cloud, and it allows a company to consolidate all NIR spectra (the results of the analysis) from multiple devices and multiple equipment manufacturers in one single place.

Once the spectra have been automatically uploaded from the NIR scanner, Chemometric Brain uses a qualitative approach to identify how the ‘fingerprint’ of a sample fits within a standard library previously created for the same product and then highlights any variation from the specific product. Chemometric Brain has hundreds of product libraries available, as a result of more than 12 years of work and research, which makes identification easier and can be rapidly implemented in any food company.

 Chemometric Brain is a QC system that provides a new vision of ingredients and final recipes

The solution has been developed and trailed over last years by a team lead by Dr Beatriz Carrasco, Chemometric Brain CTO, who recognised that the data available from NIR spectra could be used in many new applications apart from the initial scope of powder-based food and nutrition: “We are very proud to offer Chemometric Brain to the Food Industry as a solution to democratize the use of a very powerful technique as NIRS which as technology has been around for many years but never extensively adapted into the food sector due to the complexity and lack of easy-to-use solutions in the market. Chemometric Brain makes it possible to have a new vision of both ingredients and final recipes. This enhances your knowledge about them, which improves food safety and decreases risks”.

The system has been reviewed by CRA-W, the Walloon Agricultural Research Centre, a prestigious European organization specialised in food research.

 “The Chemometric Brain is very interesting because it brings a global solution in the private sector to manage a large number of data coming from different instruments. We are testing lots of new algorithms at research level and here the Chemometric Brain brings that into a single tool making that available to everyone. The graphic interface is also very helpful to make companies see what happens with their products”, says Dr. Vincent Baeten, Head of the Quality and Authentication of Products Unit at CRA-W.

A pioneering own software now available for any food company

Chemometric Brain was originally created as proprietary software of Blendhub, the first global network for food production through multi-localised production hubs; in January 2020 it separated from Blendhub into a completely independent organization due to significant interest from a large number of organisations in the sector to adopt the technology into their own companies.  

Given the global issues with food authenticity and complicated or broken supply chains Chemometric Brain provides a simple to use highly innovative cloud-based solution which can be implemented very quickly in a matter of days.

Founder of Chemometric Brain, Henrik Stamm Kristensen says: “The development of a sustainable, safe and secure agrifood value chain with the participation of all stakeholders from seed-to-mouth, has been my main objective since I founded my first food tech start-up back in 1997. And after years of development, library creations and validation by selected ingredients suppliers and food producers I am extremely excited about the launch of Chemometric Brain being my first ever independent SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform company which in the next few years will benefit thousands of companies in creating a completely new level of traceability, security and prediction in their individual supply chains”.