Identification of Maturity Stage of Cacao using Visible Near Infrared (Vis-NIR) and Shortwave Near Infrared (SW-NIR) Reflectance Spectroscopy

Choosing the cacao maturity stage is essential for producing high-quality cacao beans. Identifying indicators of the maturity level of cacao is a complex task because these fruits do not exhibit the characteristics of other fruits during the ripening period. Generally, cacao maturity is determined manually based on the estimated daily harvest date using sensory observation, which is marked by changes in the color of the cacao skin. This is certainly inaccurate because visual assessment is only performed subjectively. This is inaccurate because visual assessment is only performed subjectively, which is not in line with the demands of Industrial Revolution 4.0, which is a fast and accurate technology for sorting cacao. In this study, cacao maturity was identified using visible (350-1000 nm) and shortwave near-infrared spectra (SW-NIR) spectroscopy (1000-1600 nm). Chemometric analysis using principal component analysis-linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA) was used to classify cacao maturity. The results showed that SW-NIR spectroscopy yielded better performances with calibration and prediction accuracy of 92,50% and 85% using Savitzky–s 1st derivative (SGD1) spectra compared to Vis-NIR spectroscopy had calibration and prediction accuracies of 90% and 86% using raw spectra for PCA-LDA model.