The use of near-infrared spectroscopy and chemometrics for determining the shelf-life of products.

In this work a procedure for determining the shelf-life of products by merging near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, multivariate techniques of data analysis, and kinetic theory is presented. This procedure allows information from several sources (sensory, physical chemical, and instrumental) to be merged via the multivariate accelerated shelf-life test (MASLT) algorithm. The MASLT is a multivariate approach that relies on soft modeling via an unfolding principal component analysis (u-PCA) and hard modeling, through the conventional kinetic theory, for determining the final shelf-life of products. The procedure was successfully applied to a consumer goods product (a body lotion), whose shelf-life was determined to be 3 years and 9 months, in accordance with results previously obtained using conventional analytical techniques and univariate methods of data analysis.