Quantitative Determination of Lard Adulteration by FTIR Spectroscopy with Chemometrics Method - Vegetable Palm Oil

Food adulteration is a persistent problem which could occur either accidentally or intentionally. Among the food products, edible oil is the most prone to adulteration and this poses a major concern in terms of economical and religious point of view. For example, the Islamic law prohibits Muslims from consuming pork in any form, including lard in food products. Therefore, it is necessary to develop analytical techniques to identify and quantify lard adulterated edible oil.

Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is an effective technique to differentiate fats and oils as different compounds have unique fingerprint region in the infrared (IR) region. FTIR spectroscopy in combination with chemometrics data analysis such as multi-linear regression (MLR) or partial least squares (PLS) regression is a fast and simultaneous quantitative analysis of multi-component. In this application news, we introduce a method for quantitative determination of lard adulterated vegetable palm oil using FTIR spectroscopy and PLS quantitative calibration model.