A robust quantitative near infrared modeling approach for blend monitoring

•A Near-infrared calibration strategy was developed for pharmaceutical blend monitoring in which only gram scale material was required to monitor kilogram scale blending process.•Quantitative Near-Infrared spectroscopy models for blend monitoring developed on small-scale with same optical setup and no blender showed similar performance to models built on larger scale with the blender.•Density control on small-scale showed to have significant effect when modeling on larger scale as the prediction bias increased when density was not controlled in the small-scale calibration dataset.