Fish freshness decay measurement with a colorimetric artificial olfactory system

Emerging Approach for Fish Freshness Evaluation: Principle, Application and Challenges

Affected by micro-organisms and endogenous enzymes, fish are highly perishable during storage, processing and transportation. Efficient evaluation of fish freshness to ensure consumer safety and reduce raw material losses has received an increasing amount of attention. Several of the conventional freshness assessment techniques have plenty of shortcomings, such as being destructive, time-consuming and laborious. Recently, various sensors and spectroscopic techniques have shown great potential due to rapid analysis, low sample preparation and cost-effectiveness, and some methods are especially non-destructive and suitable for online or large-scale operations. Non-destructive techniques typically respond to characteristic substances produced by fish during spoilage without destroying the sample. In this review, we summarize, in detail, the principles and applications of emerging approaches for assessing fish freshness including visual indicators derived from intelligent packaging, active sensors, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and optical spectroscopic techniques. Recent developments in emerging technologies have demonstrated their advantages in detecting fish freshness, but some challenges remain in popularization, optimizing sensor selectivity and sensitivity, and the development of algorithms and chemometrics in spectroscopic techniques.

Recent advances in methods and techniques for freshness quality determination and evaluation of fish and fish fillets: a review

The freshness quality of fish plays an important role in human health and the acceptance of consumers as well as in international fishery trade. Recently, with food safety becoming a critical issue of great concern in the world, determination and evaluation of fish freshness is much more significant in research and development. This review renovates and concentrates recent advances of evaluating methods for fish freshness as affected by preharvest and postharvest factors and highlights the determination methods for fish freshness including sensory evaluation, microbial inspection, chemical measurements of moisture content, volatile compounds, protein changes, lipid oxidation, and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) decomposition (K value), physical measurements, and foreign material contamination detection. Moreover, the advantages and disadvantages of these methods and techniques are compared and discussed and some viewpoints about the current work and future trends are also presented.