In food process engineering there is a need for non-destructive, fast and accurate techniques for online quality inspection. Spectroscopy based methods are already used by the industry for non-destructive internal quality analysis of food. However, these techniques require contact with the sample surface, therefore in this research a hyperspectral scatter imaging technique has been elaborated to perform contactless spatially resolved diffuse reflectance spectroscopy for estimation of optical properties of selected biological materials. These optical properties then can be correlated to the actual quality attributes with respect to chemical and physical properties of food material. Three dimensional hypercubes with two spatial and one spectral axis are constructed from the images of apple fruits acquired with the hyperspectral scatter imaging set up. The optical properties were estimated from the scatter images using an inverse light propagation model for selected wavelength bands. Preliminary results showed that the hyperspectral scatter imaging technique can been used as a contactless, rapid and accurate method for on line quality determination of agricultural and food products.