Review discusses NIRS technology improving quality and efficiency in black tea production, indicating potential for industrial application.
Black tea is the most widely consumed tea globally, yet its traditional empirical production suffers from unstable quality and low efficiency, conflicting with modern industrial standards. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), a rapid and nondestructive technological tool, has emerged as key enable for the digital transformation of black tea production by supporting data-driven processing decisions and real-time quality assessment. This review summarizes NIRS across all black tea processing stages and post-production control, identifies core technical bottlenecks hindering industrial scaling with targeted solutions, and outlines future directions focusing on data fusion and monitoring-control system integration. Literature analysis reveals NIRS is validated for most scenarios of black tea production but remains predominantly lab-based, in industrial application is promising with advanced devices and algorithms. This review bridges lab-industry gaps, laying a foundation for Industry 4.0-aligned data-driven precision production in the black tea industry.
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Zhu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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