Cocoa is high on many companies’ current risk radar for authenticity threats, due to recent supply pressures and price increases. Carob has legitimate uses as a cocoa replacement, and carob flour has been cited as a potential cocoa adulterant.
This paper (purchase required) reports the use of direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry (DART-MS) as a rapid laboratory-based authentication test with the potential for a portable device. Reference samples of cocoa powders, carob flours, and mixtures of the two were extracted with buffer and interrogated by DART-MS. The mass spectra were used to develop classification models. A principal component-linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA) model was used to discriminate between cocoa powder and cocoa powder amended with 15% carob flour. The accuracy using internal validation was 100%. Using an external validation dataset, the accuracy, precision, and recall were 96.0%, 94.8%, and 97.3%, respectively.
For a descriptor of DART-MS see FAN’s analytical method explainers.
