There are many species of cinnamon, with different commercial values, and so ground cinnamon is a perennial risk for substitution or adulteration of one species by another. This article (open access) reviews analytical methods for cinnamon authentication. It lists over 30 targeted methods, published from the 1980’s to the current day. The most common analytical markers in cinnamon authentication are cinnamaldehyde, coumarin, eugenol, and cinnamyl alcohol, but methods also include profiling of trace metal and mineral content. The review also lists 18 untargeted methods using techniques such as NMR or IR coupled with chemometrics. The authors conclude that most untargeted studies are limited to exploratory analysis and the ones employing classification chemometric methods are mostly devoted to the classifying pure samples of different species. More work is needed to develop methods to detect partial adulteration, which the authors consider to be a high risk in the current market.
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