Alpha MOS

Alpha MOS (NYSE Euronext, A) is a company which designs and manufactures analytical instruments for chemical and sensory analysis. More specifically, they design and manufacture instruments for odor, taste and visual analysis. The company was created in 1993. It is headquartered in Toulouse, France and owns three subsidiaries in Hanover (USA), Tokyo (Japan) and Shanghai (China). Alpha MOS Electronic Nose, Electronic Tongue and Electronic Eye have various applications in Food and Beverage mainly, Packaging, Environment, Pharmaceutical Industry, Cosmetics, Chemicals and Petrochemicals.

Products
HERACLES Electronic Noses allows global analysis of odors and volatile compounds generated by liquid, gas or solid samples. They use ultra fast gas chromatography technologies.

ASTREE Electronic Tongue can characterize the full taste of liquids or solids dissolved in liquids.

IRIS Electronic Eye achieves advanced visual analysis of the overall product or focused portions based on colors and shapes. It uses high resolution imaging.

All the instruments are coupled with multivariate statistics data processing.

Range of applications
Sensory analysis instruments are used by different departments: Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC), Research & Development (R&D), and Process & Production for various purposes:

In Quality Assurance and Quality Control for:
 * Conformity of raw materials, intermediate and final products
 * Batch to batch consistency
 * Detection of contamination, spoilage or adulteration
 * Monitoring of storage conditions...

In R&D for:
 * Formulation or reformulation of products
 * Benchmarking with competitive products
 * Shelf life and stability studies
 * Selection of raw materials from different suppliers
 * Packaging interaction effects
 * Simplification of consumer preference test...

In Process and Production departments for:
 * Managing raw material variability
 * Comparison with a reference product
 * Measurement and comparison of the effects of manufacturing process on products
 * Following-up cleaning in place process efficiency
 * Scale-up monitoring
 * Cleaning in place monitoring.