`Scientists Pool Expertise in Fight Against Fake Olive Oils - Olive Oil Times
Enter keywords and hit Go →
enEnglish
enEnglishfrFrançaiselελληνικάdeDeutscheitItalianozh-CN中文ptPortuguêsesEspañoltrTürkçehrHrvatskija日本語hiहिंदी
enEnglish
enEnglishfrFrançaiselελληνικάdeDeutscheitItalianozh-CN中文ptPortuguêsesEspañoltrTürkçehrHrvatskija日本語hiहिंदी

Scientists Pool Expertise in Fight Against Fake Olive Oils

By Julie Butler
Oct. 4, 2013 10:19 UTC
Summary Summary

Experts from around the world gath­ered at the Workshop on Olive Oil Authentication in Madrid to dis­cuss the preva­lence of olive oil fraud and poten­tial solu­tions, includ­ing the use of near-infrared spec­troscopy and DNA mark­ers. The work­shop high­lighted the need for faster, more robust test­ing meth­ods, as cur­rent meth­ods are not suf­fi­cient to detect all types of fraud, as evi­denced by high non-com­pli­ance rates in Spain and Canada.

Scientists Pool Expertise in Fight on Fake Olive OilsExperts from around the world attended the Workshop on Olive Oil Authentication. See the list of par­tic­i­pants here.

More than twenty of the world’s experts on olive oil ver­i­fi­ca­tion met ear­lier this year, and a recent sum­mary of their brain­storm­ing pro­vides an illu­mi­nat­ing update on olive oil fraud and pos­si­ble solu­tions.

Easy to adul­ter­ate while still stay­ing within the European olive oil stan­dard.- Christian Gertz

That there is a prob­lem was not in dis­pute. Figures released at the Workshop on Olive Oil Authentication, held in Madrid June 10 – 11, show that one in four olive oils sam­pled in Spain, and nearly one in three in Canada, failed recent offi­cial fraud tests.

A newslet­ter on the work­shop — released this week by joint hosts the European Commission and the International Olive Council (IOC) — states at the out­set that solu­tions have yet to be found for three prob­lems in par­tic­u­lar: the blend­ing of extra vir­gin olive oil or vir­gin olive oil with soft deodor­ized olive oil, or with other adul­ter­ant oils, and the eval­u­a­tion of qual­ity para­me­ters related to fresh­ness.

Scientific knowl­edge of olive oil chem­istry and tech­nol­ogy ​“lags behind the inven­tive­ness of cer­tain oper­a­tors,” it says.

And in a sep­a­rate doc­u­ment with pre­sen­ta­tions from the work­shop, Christian Gertz, of the German Society for Fat Science (DGF), said it is cur­rently ​“easy” to adul­ter­ate with low-grade olive oils or for­eign oils while still stay­ing within the phys­i­cal and chem­i­cal prop­erty lim­its of the European olive oil stan­dard.

Possible solu­tions: (NIR) spec­troscopy and DNA mark­ers

The work­shop eval­u­ated cur­rent meth­ods for mon­i­tor­ing olive oil authen­tic­ity as well as alter­na­tives that could help meet the need for tests that are ​“faster, cheaper, more robust and accepted world­wide.”

Among the many state-of-the-art options dis­cussed was near-infrared (NIR) spec­troscopy, a ​“quick, easy, cheap” method Gertz pre­dicted would become, ​“a dom­i­nant ana­lyt­i­cal tool for rou­tine and real-time food safety and qual­ity con­trols.”

The attrac­tive­ness of DNA-based meth­ods was also dis­cussed, par­tic­u­larly regard­ing the detec­tion of the adul­ter­ation of vir­gin olive oil with other veg­etable oils, and also the poten­tial for an ​“iden­tity card” for pre­mium olive oils.

“The com­plete sequence of the olive genome that will be shortly avail­able will pro­vide genomic infor­ma­tion for devel­op­ing more effi­cient DNA mark­ers,” the newslet­ter said.

Pigments and other pos­si­ble para­me­ters

Australian Oils Research’s Rodney Mailer told the work­shop that two new meth­ods of fraud detec­tion, DAGs (dia­cyl­glyc­erols) and PPPs (which mea­sures degra­da­tion of olive oil’s chloro­phyll pig­ment to pyropheo­phytin), have shown con­sid­er­able promise in deter­min­ing oils which are old, have been poorly stored or pos­si­bly refined. Some orga­ni­za­tions have resisted inves­ti­ga­tion of these meth­ods ​“despite the evi­dence,” he said.

But Lanfranco Conte, from Italy’s University of Udine, dis­cussing the chal­lenges of detect­ing adul­ter­ation with soft deodor­ized olive oils, said that DAGs and PPPs had lim­i­ta­tions in this area as both are strongly influ­enced by stor­age time and con­di­tions.

Advertisement
Advertisement

However, sum­ming up the experts’ views dur­ing later dis­cus­sions on research on olive oil pig­ments — mainly chloro­phyll and carotenoids — the newslet­ter said that despite their sen­si­tiv­ity to light, tem­per­a­ture or oil age­ing, these had var­i­ous strong points which should be taken into account.

“Participants high­lighted the needs of ref­er­ence mate­ri­als for chloro­phyll a and β‑carotene and of sup­port from the IOC and JRC (European Commission Joint Research Centre) to coor­di­nate ring tests for method validations.The objec­tives could be reached within a nearly three years period of research.”

Scientists Pool Expertise in Fight on Fake Olive Oils

Complementing the panel test

Chemical tests don’t inform about aroma or taste, hence the need for the panel test, but the work­shop heard that the steady increase in olive oil con­sump­tion requires an increased num­ber of well-trained sen­sory pan­els, ​“which are costly to main­tain.”

New devices (such as elec­tronic noses and tongues) and ana­lyt­i­cal meth­ods (such as dynamic head-space and solid phase micro extrac­tion analy­sis) capa­ble of using the same com­pounds — volatiles — as human sen­sors could ​“lessen the work of sen­sory pan­els”.

Challenges and rec­om­men­da­tions

The work­shop par­tic­i­pants also iden­ti­fied var­i­ous obsta­cles to progress in the fight against fake olive oils. These include poor knowl­edge of the deodor­iza­tion processes used in the indus­try and lack of access to rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ples of soft deodor­ized olive oil, such as to help train sen­sory pan­els.

Among other mea­sures, they sug­gested cre­at­ing an indus­trial plant to pro­duce a range of sam­ples of soft deodor­ized oils.

Regarding cur­rent stan­dards, par­tic­i­pants said ​“exist­ing lim­its for FFAs (free fatty acids) and UV (ultra-vio­let) should be reduced and total amounts of ery­thro­diol and uvaol should be cal­cu­lated instead of a per­cent­age of total sterols,” the newslet­ter also said.

Official fraud test results in Spain

Juan Ramón Izquierdo, from the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment’s olive oil tast­ing panel, and Angela Sheridan, from the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency, shared results of olive oil ver­i­fi­ca­tion tests in their respec­tive coun­tries.

There were 770 inspec­tions in Spain in 2012 and a 23 per­cent non-com­pli­ancy rate, accord­ing to Izquierdo, who said nearly half of the vio­la­tions of applic­a­ble stan­dards related to qual­ity and purity.

“Those regard­ing qual­ity are basi­cally related to the organolep­tic qual­ity of vir­gin olive oils. Basically they con­sist of pack­ing lower qual­ity oils as extra vir­gin oils.” But lam­pante oils were also found, he said.

Nearly a third of the vio­la­tions related to prod­uct label­ing, four per­cent to trace­abil­ity, and the rest involved other breaches.

As for the label­ing breaches, these were mainly due to mis­use of the legal def­i­n­i­tions in EU reg­u­la­tion 29/2012 on mar­ket­ing stan­dards for olive oil, par­tic­u­larly the need to include on prod­ucts of the ​“olive oil” cat­e­gory the sen­tence: ​“oil com­pris­ing exclu­sively olive oils that have under­gone refin­ing and oils obtained directly from olives.”

According to Izquierdo, this sen­tence ​“is not used by the packer on many occa­sions.”

He said that while the meth­ods required by cur­rent EU reg­u­la­tions are suf­fi­cient for detect­ing the more com­mon frauds in olive oil purity, there are ​“other types of fraud, includ­ing the use of deodor­ized oils, for which the cur­rent method­ol­ogy seems to be insuf­fi­cient.”

Canada: adul­ter­ation on rise again

Meanwhile, nearly a third of all olive oil sam­ples tested in 2012/13 by the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency were found unsat­is­fac­tory. Those rated unsat­is­fac­tory have a high cer­tainty of adul­ter­ation, accord­ing to Sheridan’s work­shop pre­sen­ta­tion.

Common adul­ter­ants found were veg­etable oil (canola, sun­flower and soy­bean oils), refined olive oil, and olive pomace oil.

Nearly half of all sam­ples tested in 2006/07 rated unsat­is­fac­tory. The per­cent of non-com­pli­ant sam­ples then fell steady, reach­ing 11 per­cent in 2009/10, but rose to just over 30 per­cent in 2010/11 and again in 2012/13.

Since 2007, fines total­ing $250,000 (US$242,000) have been issued and oil worth $500,000 (US$485,000) ordered destroyed.

Horizon 2020 research project planned

The pri­or­ity areas iden­ti­fied in the work­shop are now being used to pre­pare a call for a research project on olive oil authen­ti­ca­tion set to be included in the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research pro­gram due to be launched by late 2013/early 2014.

Access the work­shop pre­sen­ta­tions, posters, list of par­tic­i­pants, and newslet­ter here.


More articles on:  , ,

Advertisement

Related Articles