Simultaneously calibrating solids, sugars and acidity of tomato products using PLS2 and NIR spectroscopy.

In this work, the development of a robust spectroscopic procedure for determining, simultaneously and non-destructively, relevant quality parameters of processed tomato products (total and soluble solids, total acidity, total sugars, glucose and fructose), is described. Samples of tomato concentrate products with total solids content ranging from 6.9 to 35.9% were collected from Latin America, the US and Europe and NIR spectra were acquired in the 4000-10,000 cm(-1) region. The original spectra were pre-processed by mean-smoothing or by Fourier filter, followed by multiplicative signal correction (MSC) or derivatives. Partial least squares (PLS2 and PLS1) models were built and their predictive abilities were compared through the RMSEP of external validation. The PLS2 regression had better predictive abilities for four out of the six properties under study, namely total solids, total sugars, glucose and fructose. Besides, the model was less complex than the PLS1 models in the sense that only four factors were demanded whilst from 4 to 11 factors were necessary for building the PLS1 models. The standard error of prediction (SEP%) of the PLS2 model for each property was: total solids, 2.67; soluble solids, 1.14; total acidity, 9.60; total sugar, 18.69; glucose, 11.60; and fructose, 13.45.