Meiji University demonstrated a new system to concurrently measure lycopene and sugar contents of cherry tomatoes without slicing the tomatoes at its Ikuta campus in Kawasaki-shi, Kanagawa prefecture on August 3.
Lycopene and sugar contents of a cherry tomato are measured in a few seconds with a newly developed system by Meiji University and KUBOTA Corporation. (Kawasaki-shi, Kanagawa prefecture)
The system has been jointly developed with KUBOTA Corporation, one of the global companies for agriculture and related industries headquartered at Naniwa-ku, Osaka-shi. The instrument with the new system measures the contents of a cherry tomato just in a few seconds.
A number of consumers are paying attention to an ingredient of lycopene that is expected to prevent the effects of aging. An easy measurement of the lycopene is expected to enable the producers and their partners to apply a new marketing strategy appealing the potential health effect of the lycopene.
Lycopene is a red-colored pigment being fully contained in tomatoes. Advertising and publicity messages appealing high contents of the lycopene are appearing in the markets of fresh fruits and juice.
It was technically possible to measure the content of the lycopene in large and medium-sized tomatoes. The technology could be hardly applied to small-sized cherry tomatoes.