Estimation of the Flavor of Green Soybean during Storage from Single Pod Measurements using Dedicated Near-Infrared Transmission Spectrometer

Purpose: Green soybeans (edamame) are now an economically important and popular food product in Japan. In order to shorten breeding time and to decide an optimal harvest time, we have been developing a dedicated NIRT spectrometer since 2004 for the determination of constituent content such as sucrose and free amino acids, which are two major contributors to the eating quality, in a single pod green soybean. Methods: The obtained models showed that the developed NIRT instrument had reasonable accuracy for the determination of these two components. Then we carried out the investigation into the change in two components during a few days storage using these models with changing time, variety/cultivar, packaging and temperature. Results: The result showed that the most affecting factor on decreasing both sucrose content and free amino acids was variety/cultivar. The time, packaging and temperature also affected significantly in most cases.