Virgin coconut oil (VCO) is a functional food with important health benefits. Its economic interest encourages fraudsters to deliberately adulterate VCO with cheap and low-quality vegetable oils for financial gain, causing health and safety problems for consumers. In this context, there is an urgent need for rapid, accurate, and precise analytical techniques to detect VCO adulteration. In this study, the use of Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy combined with multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) methodology was evaluated to verify the purity or adulteration of VCO with reference to low-cost commercial oils such as sunflower (SO), maize (MO) and peanut (PO) oils. A two-step analytical procedure was developed, where an initial control chart approach was designed to assess the purity of oil samples using the MCR-ALS score values calculated on a data set of pure and adulterated oils. The pre-treatment of the spectral data by derivatization with the Savitzky-Golay algorithm allowed to obtain the classification limits able to distinguish the pure samples with 100% of correct classifications in the external validation. In the next step, three calibration models were developed using MCR-ALS with correlation constraints for analysis of adulterated coconut oil samples in order to assess the blend composition. Different data pre-treatment strategies were tested to best extract the information contained in the sample fingerprints. The best results were achieved by derivative and standard normal variate procedures obtaining RMSEP and RE% values in the ranges of 1.79-2.66 and 6.48-8.35%, respectively. The models were optimized using a genetic algorithm (GA) to select the most important variables and the final models in the external validations gave satisfactory results in quantifying adulterants, with absolute errors and RMSEP of less than 4.6% and 1.470, respectively.
Keywords: calibration model; control chart; food analysis; genetic algorithm; infrared spectroscopy; multivariate analysis; variable selection; virgin coconut oil.