Evaluation of the Capability of Horizontal ATR-FTMIR and UV-Visible Spectroscopy in the Discrimination of Virgin Olive Oils from the Moroccan Region of Beni Mellal-Khenifra

Abstract

One of the most important challenges in the authentication of olive oil is the determination of the geographical origin of virgin olive oil. In this work, we evaluated the capacity of two spectroscopic techniques, UV-Visible and ATR-FTMIR, coupled with chemometric tools to determine the geographical origin of olive oils. These analytical approaches have been applied to samples that have been collected during the period of olive oil production, in the Moroccan region of Beni Mellal-Khenifra. To develop a rapid analysis tool capable of authenticating the geographical origin of virgin olive oils from five geographical areas of the Moroccan region of Beni Mellal-Khenifra, UV-Visible and ATR-FTMIR spectral data were processed by chemometric algorithms. PCA was applied on the spectral data set to represent the data in a very small space, and then discrimination methods were applied on the principal components synthesized by the PCA. The application of the PCA-LDA method on the spectral data of UV-Visible and ATR-FTMIR shows a good ability to classify olive oils according to their geographical origin with a percentage of correct classification that represents 90.24% and 85.87%, respectively, and the processing of the spectral data of UV-Visible and ATR-FTMIR by PCA-SVM allows differentiating correctly between five olive oils with a correct classification rate of 100% and 97.56, respectively. This study demonstrated the feasibility of UV-Visible and ATR-FTMIR fingerprinting (routine technique) for the geographical classification of olive oils in the Moroccan region of Beni Mellal-Khenifra. Such developed methods can be proposed as alternative and complementary methods to authenticate the geographical origin of virgin olive oil.