A new ‘magnetic tongue’ has potential as a rapid, sensitive, and relatively inexpensive approach for food processing companies to use when developing and testing new or reformulated products, suggest researchers. Researchers from University of Aarhus in Denmark and University of Naples, Italy, tested the potential of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) as a predictive tool to measure sensory descriptors of foods - using 18 different types and brands of canned tomatoes as an initial model. Writing in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the team reported that they were able to correlate the NMR metabolomic fingerprints recorded for canned tomato samples to sensory descriptors for bitterness, sweetness, sourness, saltiness, tomato and metal taste, redness, and density; “suggesting that NMR might be a very useful tool for the characterization of sensory features.” “In particular, we have used an NMR metabolomic approach that allowed us to differentiate the analyzed sa
