Detection of Food Freshness in Chicken Meat Based on Weight Variations Using ZnO Gas Sensor

In today's food industry, ensuring the safety and quality of chicken meat is important for protecting the public's health and top priority for both consumers and producers. Reliable detection methods are important to address concerns about eating low-quality chicken meat, especially when determining its freshness or food contamination. Therefore, this study proposed a gas sensor as a device to sense the released gas from the chicken meat at a certain time. The ZnO gas sensor was exposed to the chicken meat based on various weights: 200 g, 100 g, 50 g, 25 g, and 10 g at room temperature for 24 hours. The ZnO gas sensor was fabricated using a screen-printing method on a Kapton film. Integrating the gas sensor with an IoT platform by using the Blynk application makes it easier to monitor and identify freshness in real-time applications. The results highlighted that the highest sensing response value was 55 by ZnO-3 when exposed to the 200 g chicken breast. The average time for chicken breast to be spoiled was approximately 20 hours for all weights of chicken breast, which are 200 g, 100 g, 50 g, 25 g, and 10 g. The results showed that the fabricated ZnO gas sensor outperformed the commercial sensor, MQ137, in detecting the gas released from the chicken meat. Thus, this gas sensor can be used to sense odor gases from the chicken meat.