51B-4

A. K. MACHA, Dairy Technology Programme, Acharya N G Ranga Agricultural University, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 571502, India and K. K Reddy.

Quality control laboratories of research and development institutions and food industries offer virtually a virgin territory for computer software applications. Software tools that help reduce time, paper work and tedious calculations are in great demand in the food analytical laboratories.

With the objective of assisting the food professional in the quality control laboratory, Softkit, a user friendly software package has been developed.

The software package has been designed exclusively for the food and dairy analytical laboratory. This software facilitates more customized design and organization of experimental data for food products. The package aims to curtail the cumbersome calculations, provide user-friendly as well as user-defined data entry interface for various physico-chemical and microbiological parameters. An additional feature of case sensitive help file, which serves as on-line reference for the principles, theory, apparatus & reagents, procedures and calculations has been compiled with the package. The software aids in the statistical analysis, graphical representation and report generation of the computed and tabulated data. It also facilitates the import/export of the experimental data from other software packages like MS Excel.

The software could be of great utility in the quality control laboratories of various R&D institutions and food industries.