A Tentative Measurement of Brown Pigments in Various Processed Foods

A tentative method for measuring brown pigment in food was proposed and applied to 25 items of commercial browned foods. The principle was based on the assumption that any brown pigment with general absorption in the visible wave-length spectrum is quantitatively equivalent to melanoidin prepared from a model system of the Maillard reaction. The spectral curve for general absorption was represented by the equation dE/dλ=-kE (E, absorbance; λ = wave length; k = constant > 0), of which the value k w as found to correlate with the molecular weight and the molar extinction coefficient and to serve as an empirical parameter for the measurement of brown substances in different foods.