Affiliation:
1. Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Chemistry, Universitat de Barcelona, Martí i Franquès 1-11, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
2. Research Institute in Food Nutrition and Food Safety, Universitat de Barcelona, Av. Prat de la Riba 171, Edifici Recerca (Gaudí), 08921 Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Spain
3. Serra Húnter Fellow Programme, Generalitat de Catalunya, Via Laietana 2, 08003 Barcelona, Spain
Abstract
Cocoa and its derivative products, especially chocolate, are highly appreciated by consumers for their exceptional organoleptic qualities, thus being often considered delicacies. They are also regarded as superfoods due to their nutritional and health properties. Cocoa is susceptible to adulteration to obtain illicit economic benefits, so strategies capable of authenticating its attributes are needed. Features such as cocoa variety, origin, fair trade, and organic production are increasingly important in our society, so they need to be guaranteed. Most of the methods dealing with food authentication rely on profiling and fingerprinting approaches. The compositional profiles of natural components –such as polyphenols, biogenic amines, amino acids, volatile organic compounds, and fatty acids– are the source of information to address these issues. As for fingerprinting, analytical techniques, such as chromatography, infrared, Raman, and mass spectrometry, generate rich fingerprints containing dozens of features to be used for discrimination purposes. In the two cases, the data generated are complex, so chemometric methods are usually applied to extract the underlying information. In this review, we present the state of the art of cocoa and chocolate authentication, highlighting the pros and cons of the different approaches. Besides, the relevance of the proposed methods in quality control and the novel trends for sample analysis are also discussed.
Funder
Agencia Estatal de Investigación
Agency for Administration of University and Research Grants
Subject
Plant Science,Health Professions (miscellaneous),Health (social science),Microbiology,Food Science
Cited by
1 articles.
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