Abstract
Some commercial sweet sorghum syrups can be fraudulently or accidently adulterated with inexpensive sugar syrups, particularly high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or corn syrup, and sold at a relatively low market price or even mis-branded. This undermines the economic stability of the current small-scale producers of food-grade sweet sorghum syrup as well as the developing large-scale bioproduct industry. An analytical method is urgently needed to evaluate adulterated commercial sweet sorghum syrups. Ion chromatography with integrated pulsed amperometric detection (IC-IPAD) has been previously used to differentiate white, refined sugars manufactured from sugarcane and sugar beet. By applying a strong IC-IPAD NaOH/NaOAc gradient method over 45 min, monosaccharides, oligosaccharides and oligosaccharide isomers of at least 2 to 12 dp, as well as sugar alcohols can be detected in multiple commercial sweet sorghum and other sugar syrups. Fingerprint IC oligosaccharide profiles are extremely selective, sensitive, and reliable. By using five characteristic marker chromatography peaks of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), including isomaltose, maltose and maltotriose, in combination with a low sucrose peak, adulterated and mis-branded syrups were identified. The analysis of 7.0 Brix blind syrup samples, marker peaks allowed the detection of as low as 10% HFCS adulteration, which is within the lower limit of adulteration before action is taken.
Highlights
EMA—Economically Motivated Adulteration (EMA) is considered by the Food and Drug Agency of the United States Government [1] as “the fraudulent, intentional substitution or addition of a substance in a product for the purpose of increasing the apparent value of the product and reducing the cost of its production, i.e., for economic gain”
Some highly sophisticated methods exist to differentiate the source sugars in honey and other sugar syrups, i.e., Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS), Deuterium‐NMR, and Calorimetry (DSC), these were considered as reference techniques
The findings reported in this paper have provided experimental proof that adulteration and mis-branding can be detected in commercial sweet sorghum syrups using a strong Ion chromatography with integrated pulsed amperometric detection (IC-IPAD)
Summary
EMA—Economically Motivated Adulteration (EMA) is considered by the Food and Drug Agency of the United States Government [1] as “the fraudulent, intentional substitution or addition of a substance in a product for the purpose of increasing the apparent value of the product and reducing the cost of its production, i.e., for economic gain”. As sweet sorghum is a very promising feedstock for the production of biofuels and bioproducts [3], the adulteration of syrups with high starch substitutes, such as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and corn syrups, could impact bio-yields. This is because starch is more difficult and costly to ferment than soluble sugars, since it requires enzymes.
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