Authentication of pomegranate juice in binary and ternary mixtures with spectroscopic methods

Abstract

Fruit juices are among the most commonly adulterated food products and especially pomegranate juice as a high value product is mixed with different adulterants for unfair economic profit. It was aimed to investigate the performances of UV–visible and Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopies combined with chemometric methods to determine adulteration of pomegranate juice with dark colored sour cherry and black carrot juices. Binary and ternary mixtures of pomegranate juice with 2 adulterants were prepared at 5–25% levels. After various data transformations, both spectroscopic data of authentic and adulterated samples were evaluated with different chemometric classification tools. Classification models with 97% correct classification rate for validation set were obtained both for UV–visible and FTIR spectral data. Accurate predictions of adulterant concentration were also achieved with chemometric models using both spectroscopic data. These spectroscopic techniques provide rapid and accurate prediction of pomegranate juice adulteration in binary and ternary mixtures with dark colored juices.