Olive oil quality control system

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Greate Green R&D vision:

 

The challenge:

Olive oil quality is determined by some critical parameters like acidity and k values. On the other hand, it is widely known that the price of the olive oil and olive oil related products is strongly dependent on the quality. Thus, it remains critical to monitor such parameters throughout the production stages of the oil from the grapes, after production, as well as, at the post-production storage of the olive oil. Up to this date, the most common approach in the industry is to measure the acidity of the olive oil just after production. This tactic offers a rough but fast assessment of the olive oil quality in terms of acidity, and thus, a first estimate of the price. Moreover, it provides an indication of where to store the product, after production, in order to store oils of similar quality within the same storage tanks. However, this approach lacks two important aspects. First, there is no way to take appropriate actions on improving the olive oil quality during production, since the first indication of the acidity is determined after production. Second, following production the olive oil is stored within tanks of thousands of tons capacity for several months. During this storage period, the critical parameters of the oil alter a lot due to external conditions such as temperature, humidity and so on. Despite this, there is no robust system to monitor the quality of the stored oil, apart from the individual, costly, time consuming, expensive, manual sampling of oil from the tank and transfer to a chemical laboratory.

 

The vision of “PhotoOlive” project:

Greate Green aims to tackle this challenge by providing advanced methods of in-situ and online monitoring of the olive oil critical parameters during production and post-production storage, by means of state-of-the-art photonic and spectroscopy techniques. Moreover, the data collection will be performed by sophisticated user-friendly computer software that will allow wireless data distribution through IoT technology. Thus, it is believed that the implementation of PhotoOlive is expected to bring significant changes to the simplification and acceleration of monitoring and distributing olive oil quality parameters, i.e. acidity and k values, without the need for sampling and transferring oil to chemistry labs.

 

Please contact us if you would like to learn more about the project methodology, objectives, and expected outcomes.