Edible Bird Nest Case Study

2.4 Quality of Edible Bird Nest Since the process of harvesting EBN is often painstaking and dangerous, the technique of harvesting the EBN will be influenced by the cave site and the height above ground or water bed thus the quality of the EBN are influence by how is the EBN are harvested (Leh, 2001; Marcone, 2005). Human harvest the EBN three times per year and each harvest are on the different weather which is the first period is on January to April, second period is on May to August and the third is from September to December. In the first period, there is copious rainfall that will develop the growth of the small little animal and plant which in turn will give the swiftlets food. Swiftlets than will grow strong enabling them to produce a lot amount of saliva improving the quality of the nest and lowered the impurities level. As we can see, the expensive and high quality nest is EBN that are harvested from the first period. On the second period, the season are quite dry making the food supply to reduced and affect the …show more content…
Authenticity of EBN The high demand of EBN especially from the Hong Kong, China and Taiwan has led to the production of adulterated and fake EBN product in the global market. In order to increase the net weight of the nest prior to sale, a few material has been identified as common adulterants including karaya gum, red seaweed, Tremella fungus, sodium alginate, agar, nature plant and egg white. Usually these materials incorporated during the processing stages at levels approximating 10% and extremely difficult to detect due to their similarity of colour, appearance, texture and taste to the actual salivary nest cement (Marcone, 2005). The China research team has developed a simple but accurate and reliable spectrophotometry method to determine the content of edible bird’s nest (Huang et al., 2003). The method is to evaluate the internal content of N-acetylneuramic acid, which is a nine-carbon sugar also one of the major components in