ABSTRACT
Egg quality: consumer preferences and measurement techniques Bart De Ketelaere, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Koen De Reu, Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research (ILVO), Belgium; and Steven Vermeir, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
1 Introduction
2 Consumer perceptions of egg quality and consumer preferences for eggs
3 Instrumental techniques for measuring eggshell quality
4 Instrumental techniques for measuring egg freshness
5 Instrumental techniques for measuring other quality attributes
6 Conclusions and future perspectives
7 Where to look for further information
8 References
This chapter deals with egg quality – how consumers perceive egg quality, and how instrumental techniques offer the possibility of measuring those quality characteristics that are important to them. The structure of this chapter is as follows. In the first section, the perception of egg quality by consumers is discussed, as well as their preferences. In the subsequent sections, instrumental techniques able to assess those quality attributes in an objective way are discussed. We focus on techniques that are non-destructive and fast, since they can be used online on commercial grading machines that sort up to 200 000 eggs an hour. Besides, as there are several recent papers and books on egg quality and the measurement thereof, the focus of this chapter is on recent developments in instrumental techniques. The use of instrumental techniques is split up according to their application. The first section deals with the eggshell quality, both from a mechanical point of view (presence of cracks, strength) and from its visual appearance (dirt, colour). The next section gives an overview of techniques that can be used to determine the internal quality of the egg. This embraces a multitude of aspects such as the freshness which relates to the viscosity of the albumen, odour and air cell height. The last section on instrumental techniques measuring egg quality is devoted to the detection of anomalies in the egg, such as blood spots and bacterial infection. In our concluding section, we map consumer preferences to current state-of-the-art sensing technologies and define some future perspectives for research.
