Chrominfo: Why acid-base titration is important in food industry

The analysis of food products by titration ensures that the foods have a balanced composition.

In the last few years, the food industry's quality standards have grown a lot and sometimes reached the level of the pharmaceutical industry. Because of this, more and more modern piston burettes and automatic titrators are being used in the food lab because they meet the requirements for accuracy, reliability, and being ability to keep records.

What is titration?

Titration is an analytical technique in chemistry used to determine the concentration of an unknown component in a sample. It is a type of quantitative chemical analysis utilized in a variety of industries, such as pharmaceutical, food processing, water, textile, dairy, petroleum, chemical manufacturing, and agriculture sector.

The principle behind titration is that we add a solution, called a titrant, to the sample (analyte) we want to analyze. A known chemical in the titrant will react with the sample. A burette is used to add the titrant. Using this tool; we can exactly know the volume of the titrant.

As soon as we do this, a chemical reaction will happen in the sample, which will change its characteristics. At the endpoint or equivalence point of the reaction, the substance reacts with the titrant and the color of the indicator changes.

According to the nature of the chemical reaction occurring between the titrant and sample, there are four types of titrations, including acid-base, redox, complexometric, and precipitation titration. They make it possible for food manufacturers to determine the amount of a reactant present in a sample.

For example, it can be used to determine the amount of salt or sugar present in a product, as well as the concentration of vitamin C or vitamin E, both of which affect the color of the product.

Importance of acid-base titration:

The purpose of a titration is to determine the concentration of the sample solution by titrating the acid solution with a basic solution whose concentration is already known, or vice versa, until the solution is neutralized.

In food processing, the acidity of fruit juice is determined using acid-base titration. Redox titration can be used to determine the concentration of vitamin C in orange juice. The salt content of various foods can be determined using the precipitation titration method.

For salt testing, several food manufacturers employ manual titration techniques. To measure the concentration of salt the Mohr's method one of the oldest titration methods, this uses a silver nitrate solution. The potentiometric titration method is one option that can be performed automatically. This sample measures the change in the membrane potential of the substance.

Three industries in the industrial sector that depends on titration techniques are food processing, pharmaceutical production, and chemical manufacturing. They are used in many significant fields including product research and development, quality control, and large-scale production. In these fields, raw materials need to be calibrated at a high level, and titration can help with this.

Titration is essential to ensure the consistency of products sold, even when advanced processes such as gas chromatography (GC) or liquid chromatography (HPLC) are unavailable to most wineries for practical reasons.

Here are some of the reasons why titration is still used so often today.

It is one of the most accurate quantitative analysis techniques.
It is simple to perform and is economical, requiring little in the way of equipment.
Methods can use for concentrations of the ppm up to 100%.
It does not require a high level of skill.
The results are readily available right away.

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