Abstract
Major food adulteration incidents occur with alarming frequency and are episodic, with the latest incident, involving the adulteration of meat from 21 producers in Brazil supplied to 60 other countries, reinforcing this view. Food fraud and counterfeiting involves all types of foods, feed, beverages, and packaging, with the potential for serious health, as well as significant economic and social impacts. In the spirit drinks sector, counterfeiters often ‘recycle’ used genuine packaging, or employ good quality simulants. To prove that suspect products are non-authentic ideally requires accurate, sensitive, analysis of the complex chemical composition while still in its packaging. This has yet to be achieved. Here, we have developed handheld spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) for the first time in a food or beverage product, and demonstrate the potential for rapid in situ through-container analysis; achieving unequivocal detection of multiple chemical markers known for their use in the adulteration and counterfeiting of Scotch whisky, and other spirit drinks. We demonstrate that it is possible to detect a total of 10 denaturants/additives in extremely low concentrations without any contact with the sample; discriminate between and within multiple well-known Scotch whisky brands, and detect methanol concentrations well below the maximum human tolerable level.
Highlights
Spirit drinks are the EU’s biggest agri-food export, with almost two-thirds of the spirits produced in the EU being exported
The major chemical compound of importance is ethanol, which has been at the forefront of many previous studies as the target of detection and quantification for multiple analytical methods
It is this complexity and the resulting variation in flavours and aromas, which can be said to contribute to the global popularity of Scotch whisky
Summary
Spirit drinks are the EU’s biggest agri-food export, with almost two-thirds of the spirits produced in the EU being exported. C10H12O techniques have been employed to authenticate spirit drinks, but these may require transportation of the samples to be analysed, are destructive and provide retrospective results The use of these current methods in identifying counterfeit products is typically based on the premise that the counterfeit has a distinctly different analytical profile from the genuine product. In addition to a range of laboratory-based methods, attention has moved to the authentication of foods and beverages using spectroscopic techniques[23,24,25] that offer the potential to be employed in rapid[26], portable applications[27,28,29] Such spectroscopic techniques that have been applied to the analysis of spirit beverages include: UV-Vis spectroscopy[30,31,32], mid-infrared spectroscopy[33], near infrared[34] and Raman[34,35]. Only one of these latter studies, by Nordon and co-workers[34] was non-invasive and through-container, using Raman and NIR to measure ethanol concentration through clear glass bottles, with the authors stating that strong absorption/fluorescence occurred with coloured glass bottles
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