The final quality of potato-based food products (e.g. french fries, potato crisps?) depends largely on the physical characteristics and chemical composition of the raw potato material which is then determined by the varieties, cultivation methods, weather conditions during the growing season, and the storage conditions.  In practice, there are large variations in these characteristics of the raw potato feed into a food factory, which consequently makes it very challenging to optimize or control the processing parameters such that homogeneous and high quality products are obtained. Therefore, a non-destructive method to characterize and classify the incoming potato tissues with similar characteristics (e.g. varieties) would be very valuable for the potato processing industry. However, as different potato tissues, even those from different sources such as varieties, have a very similar appearance, visual inspection by human and RGB camera vision are not suitable for automatic and fast operation in the food industry.

 In this study, the potential of spatially resolved spectroscopy (SRS) in reflectance mode by means of a fiber optics probe in the VNIR range (400-1000 nm) was evaluated for classification and characterization of potato tissues of different varieties. One hundred and five potato samples from five high quality potato varieties (two from France, two from Belgium, and one from the Netherlands), were measured with the fiber optics probe SRS setup to obtain information on the scattering and absorption properties of the potatoes in the wavelength range from 400 to 1000 nm. In the next steps, multivariate statistical analysis was employed for classification of these samples based on the acquired spatially-resolved spectral information. Preliminary analysis showed that this SRS measurement technique in combination with multivariate statistics has high potential for classification and characterization of raw potato tissues. The classification performances when employing spatially-resolved diffuse reflectance information as compared to single point spectroscopy will also be presented.