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The demand for ‘functional foods’ and a healthy diet is growing nowadays, owing to evidence of potential health advantages linked with frequent consumption of these items as part of a balanced and diverse diet. Different colored cereals grain/pigmented cereals – mainly red, black, blue, brown, purple, and pink – have gained popularity recently due to their appealing nutritional characteristics. Anthocyanins are a type of pigment responsible for the colors and the health benefits of pigmented cereals. The different nutritional bioactive components such as phenolics, anthocyanins, phytochemicals, dietary fibre, vitamins, and other biofunctional properties have been much discussed in recent literature. This chapter summarizes and discusses the bioactive composition and health benefits of pigmented cereals, including maize, rice, wheat, and barley, with a focus on recent studies.

The food industries are looking for potential preservation methods for fruits and vegetables. The combination of osmosis and drying has proved the efficient method to improve the food quality. Osmotic dehydration is a mass transfer process in which water molecules from the food move to an osmo-active solution and the solutes from the solution migrate into the food. Advanced osmotic dehydration techniques such as electric field pulse treatment, ultrasonic and microwave-assisted dehydration, pulsed vacuum, and osmodehydrofreezing can improve the nutritional quality (bioactive) and sensory properties (color, texture, aroma, flavor) of fresh and cut-fruits without changing their reliability. Emerging osmotic dehydration technologies can preserve the structure of fruit tissue by forming microscopic channels and increasing effective water diffusivity. However, it is important to analyze the effect of advanced osmotic dehydration techniques on the quality of food products to understand the industrial scalability of these techniques. The present paper discusses the impact of recent osmotic dehydration techniques on bioactive, antioxidant capacity, color, and sensory profile of food.

In modern days, to meet the steadily growing demand for novel and nutritional food products several innovative technologies have been used in the food industry. Among them, explosion puffing (EP) is considered an efficient method for the processing of food products and is proposed as an alternative to conventional processing methods. This review discusses the wide applications of EP in drying, puffing, extraction of bioactive compounds, removal of anti-nutritional compounds, etc. Thus, it provides a complete picture of the applications of EP for the development of different food products and tries to elucidate the effect on the quality attributes of the food. EP act as a promising tool in the food industry. The improvements in the food products quality can be achieved through EP. However, several challenges such as protein denaturation, Maillard reaction, unsuitability for some food products, etc. should be addressed before the industrial adaptation of this technique.

Tea is the most widely consumed non-alcoholic beverage worldwide. In the tea sector, the high demand for tea has led to an increase in the adulteration of superior tea grades. The procedure of evaluating tea quality is difficult to assure the highest degree of tea safety in the context of consumer preferences. In recent years, the advancement in sensor technology has replaced the human olfaction system with an artificial olfaction system, i.e., electronic noses (E-noses) for quality control of teas to differentiate the distinct aromas. Therefore, in this review, the potential applications of E-nose as a monitoring device for different teas have been investigated. The instrumentation, working principles, and different gas sensor types employed for E-nose applications have been introduced. The widely used statistical and intelligent pattern recognition methods, namely, PCA, LDA, PLS-DA, KNN, ANN, CNN, SVM, etc., have been discussed in detail. The challenges and the future trends for E-nose devices have also been highlighted. Overall, this review provides the insight that E-nose combined with an appropriate pattern recognition method is a powerful non-destructive tool for monitoring tea quality. In future, E-noses will undoubtedly reduce their shortcomings with improved detection accuracy and consistency by employing food quality testing.

The halwa is a traditional thick sweet generally consumed by millions in the Middle East with more concentrated population in the South and Central Asia. Sweet corn halwa is one such traditional type prepared in the tribal region of middle Gujarat, India. It is one of the dairy delicacies of traditional Indian desserts, which needs to be optimized and dehydrated to assure the availability of the product during off-season and to provide good value in terms of money and enhancement of shelf life. The milk and sugar were added in 50 to 250 g/100 g and 12 to 14 g/100 g respectively for cooking of ingredients for 10 to 20 min to provide value to this traditional product for getting higher return to the entrepreneurs. The optimized sweet corn halwa was dehydrated in thin layers at 60 °C and drying data was fitted thin layer drying models. The physico-chemical properties and sensory evaluation of sweet corn halwa were evaluated during this experiment. The rehydrated product maintained similar overall acceptability, indicating comparable sensory characteristics with fresh sweet corn halwa.

The degradation kinetics of dehydrated sweet corn for total sugar, ascorbic acid, TSS, pH, rehydration parameters, colour and moisture content using low density polyethylene pouches (LDPE) and laminated aluminium foil pouches (LAFP) with or without vacuum were studied. The samples were kept for 3 months and were analysed at every 15 days. During the storage, total sugar, ascorbic acid and total soluble solids reduced from 10.50 to 9.73 g/100 g, 9.36 to 8.86 mg/100 g, 83 to 51°Brix respectively. Rehydration coefficient and rehydration ratio reduced from 90.28 to 75.27, 2.64 to 1.56. Colour L∗ value, a∗ value. b∗ value changed from 61.00 to 70.13, 42.93 to 53.27, 55.58 to 64.24 respectively resulting in increase in ΔE value and chroma value up to 16.29, 70.23 to 83.45 respectively. The moisture content increased from 2.12 to 3.92% in packages. The average sensory score of 7.86 even after 90 days of storage in laminated aluminium foil pouch with vacuum indicates that the product may be stored for 90 days satisfactorily. Zero and first order models fitted well and can be used for predicting various properties of dehydrated sweet corn during storage.