Horticultural Science and Technology 원예과학기술지 ISSN:1226-8763(Print) 2465-8588(Online)

Color is one of the quality determining factors for pepper powder. To measure the color of pepper powder, several methods including high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), thin layer chromatography (TLC), and ASTA-20 have been used. Among the methods, the ASTA-20 method is most widely used for color measurement of a large number of samples because of its simplicity and accuracy. However it requires time consuming preprocessing steps and generates chemical waste containing acetone. As an alternative, we developed a fast and simple method based on a visible/near infrared (Vis/NIR) hyperspectral method to measure the color of pepper powder. To evaluate correlation between the ASTA-20 and the visible/near infrared (Vis/NIR) hyperspectral methods, we first measured the color of a total of 488 pepper powder samples using the two methods. Then, a partial least squares (PLS) model was postulated using the color values of randomly selected 366 samples to predict ASTA values of unknown samples. When the ASTA values predicted by the PLS model were compared with those of the ASTA-20 method for 122 samples not used for model development, there was very high correlation between two methods (R2 = 0.88) demonstrating reliability of Vis/NIR hyperspectral method. We believe that this simple and fast method is suitable for high- throughput screening of a large number of samples because this method does not require preprocessing steps required for the ASTA-20 method, and takes less than 30 min to measure the color of pepper powder.