Food Industry Tests Techno-Tasters to Judge Flavor

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USDA Tests Robotic Meat-Grading System

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New robotic technology being tested by the U.S. Agriculture Department at four Nebraska slaughterhouses determines whether sides of beef should be graded as USDA "Prime," "Choice," or "Select" -- an interpretive endeavor that for the past 80 years has been the full-time work of journeymen meat graders. Human meat graders will check the systems' work until the machines prove capable of replacing those workers.

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For that and other reasons, Sessions said, live employees will be needed "well into the future."

Electronic tongues and noses face even tougher technical challenges than meat-grading cameras. They must properly identify single molecules of interest among the billions or trillions of background molecules in foods, beverages and the air spaces around them. Most of these sensors are wands with metallic or polymer surfaces that undergo changes in electrical conductivity in the presence of particular molecules that contribute to taste or odor.

Complex computer programs are crucial, too, to calculate the myriad ways those molecules will interact -- something the brain does automatically with ease.

Alan Gelperin, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, worked for years at Bell Labs in New Jersey on an "e-nose," developed for use by grocery checkout clerks. The initial goal was to make a sniffer that could differentiate between navel and juice oranges in two seconds, the average time a checker spends ringing up an item, instead of the 30 seconds or so that earlier e-noses needed to get a clear reading.

"Looking back on it, it was truly a miracle that we succeeded," Gelperin said. "And the patent made it sound like every supermarket would have one of these things within a few months."

But the device never got commercialized, in part because of another innovation: Shoppers started putting the produce in plastic bags.

"How are we going to sniff?" Gelperin recalled, asking with obvious exasperation. "Are we going to stick a needle in there?"

Many university laboratories and companies around the world have joined the race to develop e-noses and e-tongues, some with such evocative names as FreshSense and LibraNose.

The journal Nature last month described a Japanese-made hand-held fiber-optic infrared sensor that measures oleic acid levels in raw meat, reputed by some to be a better indicator of tastiness than conventional marbling measures.

In Australia, supermarkets already are using a tastiness rating system in which cuts of meat earn labels with as many as five stars, based on a number of automated inputs including fat depth, extent of marbling and post-slaughter aging.

And in Russia, Andrey Legin and colleagues at St. Petersburg University have made an electronic tongue that can distinguish among various blends of coffee or soft drinks just as accurately as people can-- a potential boon for beverage makers wishing to ensure batch-to-batch consistency while avoiding the expense of human tasting panels.

Of all the potential applications for robotic tasters and sniffers, wine is perhaps the most attractive -- and also the most controversial.

As the Italian Barbera experiment showed, e-tongues and e-noses can be very good at differentiating among closely related wines, which means they can help authorities identify counterfeit and mislabeled wines. "The origin of wine for us is very important," said Saverio Mannino, chief of food science and microbiology at the University of Milan, who led that test.

Such systems are also very good at detecting contaminants in wine, such as the mold or must that can come with bad corks.

But wine enthusiasts bristle at the idea that a machine might someday get the final word on whether a wine is truly great.

"I guess it would be nice if I could sit with my laptop and a sampling machine and have it spit out a tasting note," said Anthony Dias Blue, editor of The Tasting Panel Magazine, a Los Angeles-based industry monthly. "But no machine can muster the level of creative smoke-blowing that wine writers can come up with to describe what they are tasting. It takes that special human ability to come up with the hyperbole to really describe a wine."