How To Judge quality of tomato paste ?

Some buyers often get some bad quality tomato paste. Then, how to judge the quality and avoid buying bad quality products? We know, some suppliers are requested by the buyers, or in the consideration of low cost, they adds starch, color or other vegetable elements. Usually, in the purchasing of canned tomato paste, suppliers may send some products pictures firstly, and provide some samples additionally, we can judge the quality of products through these resource.

First, we can judge the quality through the pictures more or less. If the content of starch is higher, as the result of modified starch’s high viscosity, there will be a membranous layer between the granules of tomato paste which will reflect light. Therefore, if the picture shows strong light refection, the tomato paste was added with some starch.

Second, we can taste the sample, taking a spoon of it into mouth, 100% purity tomato paste will melt like chocolate without residue remain. If there is residue that shows it contains other vegetable elements.

Last, we can test the most important nutrition fact, lycopene, by equipment. Usually, the content of lycopene of 100%pure 28-30%brix tomato paste should be more than 40mg/100g, if the percentage smaller, the purity is lower. In another words, if the sample was marked as 28-30% brix and the testing result of lycopene is only 20mg/100g, then the purity of sample is around 50% only.