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Herbs and spices are one of the food commodities most susceptible to adulteration and fraud. In this study, 5 fingerprinting techniques - Near Infrared (NIR), Mid-Infrared (MIR), Hyper Spectral Imaging (HSI), Gas Chromatography coupled to Mass Spectrometry (GC–MS), and Proton-transfer Reaction Time-of-Flight Mass spectrometry (PTR-TOF-MS), combined with chemometrics, are examined to evaluate their potential to authenticate oregano. In total, 102 oregano samples from one harvest season were analysed for origin and variety assessment, 159 samples for adulteration assessment, and 72 samples for batch-to-batch control. Different chemometric models were applied for adulteration, origin and variety assessment. The best results were for origin assessment, which gave prediction rates of more than 89%. A level of 10% adulteration of oregano with myrtle, sumac, olive and cistus could be detected using HSI, NIR and PTR-TOF-MS.

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Dairy products (milk, butter, cheese, yoghurt etc) form an important part of the diet, and are a significant part of national and international trade of most countries. This review by Brazilian researchers outlines the frequent forms of food fraud in dairy products and the application of traditional techniques for their detection, highlighting the gaps and disadvantages of these techniques. It then describes the application of NIR (near-infrared) spectroscopy and HSI (hyperspectral imaging) for the detection of food fraud mainly in cheese, butter, and yogurt. In conclusion, NIR spectroscopy and HSI are rapid non-destructive techniques, which also require chemometric models for their interpretation, but have been successfully applied to the authentication of dairy products.

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