More than 1000 Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) have been identified in roasted coffee. They have been shown to be indicative of the roasting process, the type (Aribica or Rustica) and the specific variety and origin of the coffee bean.
In this paper (purchase required) the authors used an untargeted strategy to process SPME-GC-MS data coupled with chemometrics to identify VOCs volatile as possible markers to discriminate Arabica coffee and its main adulterants (corn, barley, soybean, rice, coffee husks, and Robusta coffee). They reported that Principal Component Analysis (PCA) showed the difference between roasted ground coffee and adulterants, while the Hierarchical Clustering of Principal Components (HCPC) and heat map showed a trend of adulterants separation. The partial Least-Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) approach confirmed the PCA results. 24 VOCs were putatively identified, and 11 VOCs considered candidates as markers to detect coffee fraud, found exclusively in one type of adulterant: coffee husks, soybean, and rice.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
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