Application of visible-near infrared spectroscopy to evaluate the quality of button mushrooms

The Agaricus bisporus mushroom is one of the most cultivated and consumed mushrooms in the world, thanks to its delicacy, nutritional value and flavour. The quality evaluation of the A. bisporus during the harvest is generally established by a visual check by trained operators. This method complies with the request of the Distribution Channel (DC) to retailers and guarantees very low physical damage to the mushrooms; nevertheless, it is subjective and it does not guarantee the highest quality standard for the consumer. The aim of this study was to test the use of visible/near infrared (vis/NIR) reflectance spectroscopy (400–1000 nm) to objectively evaluate the quality parameters of A. bisporus mushrooms. A total of 167 samples of A. bisporus mushrooms were harvested according to the main DC purchasing standards. The vis/NIR analyses were performed the day of sampling just before the physico-chemical analyses (sizes, firmness, soluble solids content and moisture content) used as reference quality parameters. The vis/NIR spectra were correlated to reference measures in order to build predictive models using the partial least squares regression method. Calculated models gave positive results regarding the prediction of the moisture content (r2 (pred) ¼ 0.78) and firmness (r2 (pred) ¼ 0.78). Results of this explorative study could be considered encouraging and demonstrate the applicability of vis/NIR spectroscopy on A. bisporus as a rapid technique (i) to monitor the productive process directly at the company, (ii) to standardize the harvest moment, and (iii) to support DC’s buyers’ choices, nowadays exclusively based on product external characteristics.