Project of a European olive oil databank for authentication and traceability purposes

ALONSO-SALCES, R. M.; MORENO-ROJAS, J. M.; TRANTALLIDI, M.; HOLLAND, M. V.; RENIERO, F.; GUILLOU, C.

York (Reino Unido)

Simposio; Ninth International Symposium on Hyphenated Techniques in Chromatography and Hyphenated Chromatographic Analyzers & Eighth International Symposium on Advances in Extraction Techniques 2006; 2006

Royal Flemish Chemical Society

Olive oil is a very important agricultural product for the European Union. Spain, Italy and Greece, account for 79% of the world production and 71% of the world consumption. The high added value of olive oil in terms of commercial and nutritional value makes its control of great interest to EU producers and consumers. As a result, olive oil is often subject to adulteration with other edible oils, i.e. blending with lower quality olive oils. In the particular case of high value products with Protected Denomination of Origin (PDO), olive oils are subject to adulteration with olive oils that do not fulfill the PDO requirements. Therefore, validated methods to guarantee the authenticity and traceability of PDO olive oils are necessary to protect both the consumer and the producer from illicit practices in this sector.   Within the European Union, the quality control of olive oils is usually performed applying methods described in the EC Regulation 656/95. The problem of authentication of olive oils with respect to their geographical, botanical and varietal origin, has been studied using various analytical approaches like NMR (1H, 13C, 31P), NIR spectroscopy, IRMS, LC-MS, GC-MS [1, 2, 3, 4]. However, most of these considered a limited number of samples and geographical areas.   In 1991, the European Union created the EU Wine Databank, which gathers NMR and isotopic data of European wines, with the purpose of controlling their origin and authenticity. Following the same line, the objective of this ambitious project is to create a European Databank of Olive Oils, paying particular attention to olive oils that are produced under  PDO certification, in order to control the origin and detect possible fraud. In this sense, traceability systems are being developed in order to characterize the olive oils with European PDOs from different analytical points of view. Thus, methods for different analytical techniques such as LC-DAD-FLD-MS, LC-NMR, EA-IRMS, TC/EA-IRMS, GC-IRMS and NMR are being evaluated, developed and validated in order to obtain the different profiles of the olive oils. The analytical data will be further subjected to multivariate data analysis in order to develop analytical tools for authentication of olive oil products. In view of this, large sample sets of genuine olive oils have already been sampled in the last two years, and a structured sampling scheme is planned for the following years.   The results of this project are also of interest in the frame of the TRACE (http://www.trace.eu.org) project, funded by the EU through the Sixth Framework Programme under the Food Quality and Safety Priority, aimed to develop cost effective analytical methods, that should allow the determination of authenticity and detection of fraud in many food products, olive oil being one of them.