Geographical authentication of virgin olive oil by GC–MS sesquiterpene hydrocarbon fingerprint: Verifying EU and single country label-declaration

QUINTANILLA-CASAS, BEATRIZ; TORRES-COBOS, BERTA; GUARDIOLA, FRANCESC; SERVILI, MAURIZIO; ALONSO-SALCES, ROSA MARIA; VALLI, ENRICO; BENDINI, ALESSANDRA; TOSCHI, TULLIA GALLINA; VICHI, STEFANIA; TRES, ALBA

FOOD CHEMISTRY

ELSEVIER SCI LTD

Año: 2022 vol. 378

0308-8146

According to the last report from the European Union (EU) Food Fraud Network, olive oil tops the list of the mostnotified products. Current EU regulation states geographical origin as mandatory for virgin olive oils, eventhough an official analytical method is still lacking. Verifying the compliance of label-declared EU oils should beaddressed with the highest priority level. Hence, the present work tackles this issue by developing a classificationmodel (PLS-DA) based on the sesquiterpene hydrocarbon fingerprint of 400 samples obtained by HS-SPMEGC?MS to discriminate between EU and non-EU olive oils, obtaining an 89.6% of correct classification for theexternal validation (three iterations), with a sensitivity of 0.81 and a specificity of 0.95. Subsequently, multi-classdiscrimination models for EU and non-EU countries were developed and externally validated (with threedifferent validation sets) with successful results (average of 92.2% of correct classification for EU and 96.0% fornon-EU countries).