Egg-sploring The Use Of Spectroscopy In The Egg Industry

By John Oncea, Editor

The egg industry is relying on non-traditional more and more, including spectroscopy. What egg-actly is Big Egg using spectroscopy for? Let’s find out.

How much do you know about eggs? Well, if you’re not an egg-pert, it’s probably not as much as you think.

Everything Everywhere Daily produced an egg-cellent episode detailing everything you’d want to know about eggs called, well, Everything You Wanted To Know About Eggs. Give it a listen and you’ll learn things like over a billion eggs are consumed worldwide every day and humans and our ancestors have been consuming eggs of one sort or another for millions of years.

“Eggs were consumed in Ancient Greece, Egypt, China, and in Rome,” notes Everything Everywhere Daily. “In fact, in a high-end Roman banquet, the first course was traditionally based around eggs.” Want more?

• Dried egg meal was created in St. Louis in 1878 and popularized during World War II as a way to ship eggs to soldiers in the field without fear of spoilage or breaking.
• In 1911, Joseph Coyle invented the egg carton to help solve a dispute between an egg producer and a hotel that complained about eggs being delivered broken.
• In the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan, eggs are almost always refrigerated. In Europe, and most other countries, eggs are never refrigerated. Why the difference? You’ll have to listen to the podcast if you want to know but it has to do with cuticles.

“Today, eggs are a big business,” Everything Everyware Daily reports. “In 2022, 87 million metric tons of eggs were produced worldwide. Assuming the average chicken egg weighs 50g, that would mean there are 1.7 trillion eggs laid every year. That is 212 eggs per person per year, although much of that goes into baked goods and other processed foods.”

Eggs bought in the U.S. have one of three grades listed on the carton: AA, A, or B. The shell and the yolk determine these grades. An AA-grade egg has an unblemished shell and a firm round yolk with no spots of blood inside, an A-grade egg might have a less-defined yolk or minor shell blemishes, and a B-grade egg could have a hairline fracture on the shell, meat or blood spots inside the egg, or other defects.

“Grade B eggs are seldom sold directly to consumers,” notes Everything Everywhere Daily. “They are perfectly edible, but they are usually sold to commercial operators who would use them in bulk.”

Grading eggs has long been done by egg candling, “a process that consists in applying light to an egg to detect abnormalities inside it,” writes Science Direct. “The light makes the eggshell transparent; hence it is possible to analyze the components inside the eggs in a non-destructive procedure. Manual egg candling is time-consuming and pays a toll on workers’ health. It is mainly prevalent in small and medium businesses in developing countries.”

While candling can provide valuable information about the quality of eggs, it is heavy on the experience and skill of the person performing the candling can lead to inconsistencies in assessment. Additionally, candling is time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially for large-scale egg production operations.

Enter Spegg-troscopy

In recent years, modern spectroscopy methods have emerged as a more efficient and accurate alternative to egg candling. Spectroscopy can be used for many purposes in the egg industry, bringing with it “the potential to improve automation, enhance biosecurity, promote the safeguarding of animal welfare, increase intelligent grading and quality inspection, and increase efficiency,” writes the Institute of Food Technologies (IFT).

“Many studies reported the benefits of optical sensing and computer vision technologies, such as hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and spectroscopic techniques and accurate and non-destructive optical sensing technologies that have been used for the assessment of egg freshness.”

One spectroscopic technique that has gained traction in egg quality assessment is near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS involves shining near-infrared light onto a sample and measuring the absorption and reflection of light to gather information about its chemical composition. By analyzing the spectral data collected from eggs, researchers and producers can predict various quality attributes, such as freshness, nutritional content, and even the presence of contaminants.

NIRS offers several advantages over traditional egg candling. It provides rapid and non-destructive analysis, allowing for high-throughput screening of eggs without damaging them. Moreover, NIRS can be automated and integrated into production lines, reducing the need for manual inspection and improving overall efficiency and consistency.

Other spectroscopic techniques, such as hyperspectral imaging and Raman spectroscopy, are also being explored for egg quality assessment. These methods offer unique capabilities for analyzing different aspects of egg quality, such as shell integrity, bacterial contamination, and protein content.

I4.0 Technologies And The Egg Industry

Advancements in technology have resulted in the creation of innovative technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), optical sensors, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and cloud computing. These technologies have revolutionized the traditional egg industry and transformed it into a smarter and more sustainable one.

IFT goes into great detail explaining the application of I4.0 technologies – including spectroscopy –  in the egg industry in the article linked above, so much so that to try to recap it here would be doing you a disservice. I recommend you check out the article, particularly the section titled “3 Applications Of I4.0 Technologies In The Egg Industry.”

But specifically regarding spectroscopy, IFT writes it “is a good tool for identifying the intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of eggs. Real-time applications for determining various quality characteristics from a small number of essential spectra or even from a single spectrum have a significant advantage over existing techniques, especially the development of affordable handheld devices.”

They note that the size of spectroscopic instruments has been reduced to the point that handheld and portable sensing systems have been developed, enabling real-time monitoring of egg quality. IFT also reports that Vis–NIR and THz have shown significant effectiveness in egg and eggshell quality determinations.

No Egg-noring It – Spectroscopy Is The Future

Overall, modern spectroscopy methods are revolutionizing egg quality assessment by offering faster, more accurate, and more reliable alternatives to traditional candling techniques. As technology continues to advance, these spectroscopic tools are likely to become increasingly integrated into egg production processes, providing producers with valuable insights to optimize quality control and ensure consumer satisfaction.