How To Measure the Color of Spices?

Spices serves many useful functions in food products. It can help improve food flavor, used as a preservative or influence the overall color of food. Color affects our perception of food, therefore, it is important to control the color of spices to help ensure the final color of food product are produced accurately and consistently.

Spices, whether whole or pre-ground, exhibit variation in their color, making color communication or color comparison against a reference standard challenging. To eliminate color variation, the use of color measuring instrument with averaging function would be needed.  By averaging the measurements, a more representative color can be obtained. Most spices are generally opaque in nature, therefore, the color of spices can be measured using reflectance mode.