Avaliação da influência de diferentes concentrações de neutralizantes sob diferentes condições de acidez na capacidade de detecção dos métodos oficiais de análise qualitativa em leite.

Abstract

The concern about quality control and food safety in the milk production chain is a focus of the development and monitoring of technicians and state bodies of this area. For this reason, actions such as cleaning facilities, personal hygiene, qualified raw material and appropriate machinery are regulated and inspected in order to avoid the risk of contamination in the final product. However, it is still frequent cases of contamination by chemical agents, such as acidity neutralizers, used in order to hide the titratable acidity generated by microorganisms developed due to poor hygiene conditions and inadequate refrigeration. In this perspective, this paper aimed to evaluate the influence of different concentrations of neutralizing agents under different acidity values on the detection capacity and analytical sensitivity of the official methods of analysis of chemical neutralizers in milk, available in the Normative Instruction 68. For the analyses of the neutralizing agents sodium hydroxide and sodium bicarbonate, were used for each substance 2 liters of unaltered raw milk, divided into 11 aliquots, tested under conditions of 0.14; 0.18; 0.20 and 0.22% acidity and neutralizers tested at concentrations beyond their detection limit. As a result, it was found that this methodology is not effective in detecting the substances as they are purposely neutralized by the high acidity levels. Therefore, it is uncertain to ensure the quality of the milk through this methodology, as the analysis methods cannot detect the existence of sodium hydroxide and sodium bicarbonate in its composition. Hence, there is a growing need for research that evaluates and validates analysis methodologies in milk, since, if the methodology is flawed, the food safety is compromised and this milk can be sold, causing damage to the consumer's health.