Tackling food fraud in the olive oil industry
University of Liège, Belgium
Tackling food fraud in the olive oil industry – University of Liège
How do you tell a genuine olive oil from a counterfeit product? Professor Giorgia Purcaro at the University of Liège is addressing this question by profiling its headspace volatiles, which offers better reproducibility than conventional assessments using trained sensory panels.
With sensitivity crucial to success of this approach, Professor Purcaro has turned to headspace–SPME on Markes’ Centri platform to identify marker compounds that distinguish genuine oils from fraudulent equivalents – with very encouraging results.
- Customer: University of Liège, Belgium
- Application: VOCs from olive oil
- Challenge: To improve sensitivity to enable identification of key trace-level compounds to distinguish between different types of commercial olive oils
- Solution: Enhancing the sensitivity of SPME by using headspace–SPME–trap with multi-step enrichment (MSE®) on the Centri® sample extraction and enrichment platform
- Results: Enhanced trace-level sensitivity, with an average 3.01- and 5.96-fold increase (for three and six extractions, respectively) in abundance compared to a single extraction
