NIR-based Sudan I to IV and Para-Red food adulterants screening

JOHNATAN AMONACID; CAROLINA DI ANIBAL; TRENTANNI-HANSEN GIMENA; MARIA SUSANA RODRIGUEZ; LILIANA ALBERTENGO; CLAUDIO DELRIEUX

FOOD ADDITIVES AND CONTAMINANTS

TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2019 vol. 36 p. 1163 - 1172

0265-203X

Spices are added in order to enhance the organoleptic characteristics of food and culinary dishes,making them more attractive for consumers. The use of illicit cheap colourants might be profitablealong the food supply chain, posing undue risks to human health. This work evaluates the feasibilityof NIR spectroscopy with chemometrics as a rapid, simple, non-destructive and affordable screeningtool to determine the presence of Sudan I, II, III, IV and Para-red dyes in paprika. The datasetcomprised unadulterated and adulterated samples with the five studied dyes at different concentrationlevels. Several multivariate classification models were built with Linear Discriminant Analysis(LDA) and different machine learning techniques. Preliminary results show that a classifier based ononly six wavenumbers is able to determine the presence of some of these dyes in food samples inlevels that may represent risk to human health. Sensitivities and specificities above 90% wereobtained in almost all cases. These results show the feasibility of inexpensive and portable devicesthat can be useful for screening out adulterated stock along the food chain supply.