Assessment of the ribose-induced Maillard reaction as a means of gelatine powder identification and quality control

► Main sources of gelatine are porcine and bovine skin. ► Islam forbids pork-related products, whereas Hinduism forbids cow-related products. ► Important to identify and control the quality of gelatine. ► The gelatines yielded different extent of Maillard reaction when heated with ribose. ► Potential to be developed into a fast and simple quality control procedure. The addition of ribose to bovine or porcine gelatine solutions followed by heating at 95°C yielded brown solutions with different pH, colour (CIE L∗ and b∗) and absorbance (A420∗) values. These differences were used for gelatine powder identification, differentiation and quality control. Differentiation analysis of the Maillard reaction parameters was conducted using cluster analysis (CA) and confidence intervals (CI). The potential use of the method as a quality control procedure was evaluated by using statistical process control (SPC). CA revealed that the two types of gelatine could be classified into two different groups. CI (95% confidence) revealed that the absorbance and colour values could be used as indicators for differentiation between the two types of gelatine because the intervals between the Maillard reaction parameters of the samples were far apart. The methodology demonstrated good reproducibility because it behaved predictably based on the X¯–S charts generated from the SPC charts.