The present study aimed to substitute the native sugars of apples for isomaltulose. In the first stage, native sugars were partially removed from the fruit tissue, and in the second stage, isomaltulose was incorporated. The use of ultrasound was evaluated at both process stages. Water loss (WL), solid gain (SG), water activity (a_w), soluble solids content (°Brix), shrinkage (Sh), and color parameters (total color difference (ΔE), L^* a^*, b^*, Cr^*, and h°) were evaluated. The temperature of 35 °C stood out for its contribution to the mass transfer parameters (SG = 8.196%; WL = 21.699%—maximum values). There seems to be a threshold regarding the use of ultrasound in the process stages, indicating that its excessive use does not favor impregnation. The ideal process to promote the dehydration of apples and incorporation of the greatest amount of isomaltulose consisted of a treatment in which samples were immersed in water in the first stage, followed by impregnation of isomaltulose for 40 min assisted by ultrasound in the second stage. In addition, there was a significant reduction of a_w (0.971 ± 0.001) and a slight change in color parameters (2.91 ± 0.45). Only concerning Sh (28.7 ± 3.6%), this treatment was not advantageous. Graphical Abstract

Vacuum is efficient for incorporating solutes of interest into fruits. In this study, the low glycemic and insulinemic index carbohydrate, isomaltulose, was incorporated into mangos slices by immersion with a vacuum pulse (VP). The influences of the combination of pulsed vacuum time at the beginning of the process (5, 10, 15, and 20 min) and vacuum pressure (24 kPa and 48 kPa, absolute pressure) in the incorporation were evaluated with the multidimensional scaling (MDS) statistical technique. Water loss (WL), solid gain (SG), water activity (a_w), and color were also studied. The MDS effectively indicated that the vacuum incorporation (VI) with 10 min of VP at 48 kPa provided a product with higher SG (more enriched), WL, lightness, and lower a_w and total color difference. Thus, the VI with intermediate conditions resulted in a high incorporated mango with good quality.

The results of sensory evaluations of coffees are associated with latent factors, such as the particular subjectivity of each individual. Based on the foregoing, assessing the quality of a sensory panel for product discrimination basically depends on the statistical methodology to be used in data analysis. Following this argument, this study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of the EM - Expectation Maximization algorithm in discriminating groups of individuals, characterized by the degree of experience and knowledge in sensory analysis of coffees of different varieties, produced in the Serra da Mantiqueira micro-region, with different processing and altitudes. The main advantage of this algorithm is the fast convergence, when the current solution approaches the optimal solution with high precision. The disadvantage is because it is a deterministic optimization technique, which can only achieve a local optimization depending on the initialization, i.e., initial values input in the iterative procedure. It can be concluded that estimates of the correlation matrices obtained by the EM algorithm showed that the final grade has a greater influence of sweetness, in addition to discriminating groups of consumers with different sensory perceptions and in situations where the number of individuals in each group is unknown, the EM algorithm was accurate in estimating the proportion of individuals belonging to each group, assuming that the correlations of sensory responses follow a bivariate normal distribution.

Proposal of a metric selection index for correspondence analysis: an application in the sensory evaluation of coffee blends