MOS-based artificial olfactory system for the assessment of egg products freshness

The determination of egg freshness as a fundamental aspect directly related to consumers’ perception of food product quality is a major target of the egg industry. An artificial olfactory system (AOS) based on common metal oxide sensors is presented here as an interesting tool to carry out, in a simple and rapid way, the freshness assessment of industrial egg products. Contemporaneously, the correlation between AOS responses and the correspondent chemical (lactic and succinic acids) and microbiological (total viable mesophilic bacteria and Enterobacteriaceae counts) parameters, which are legal references to attest the quality of the egg products, has been demonstrated.