We use cookies to make your experience better. To comply with the new e-Privacy directive, we need to ask for your consent to set the cookies.
Determination of the Geographic Origin of Spices Using Elemental Analysis after Microwave Digestion
Introduction
Competitive advantage within the food industry has lead to fraudulent activities like intentional counterfeiting, substitution, adulteration, or mislabeling/misrepresentation of ingredients within products. Many of these tricks go unnoticed by consumers and regulating government agencies due in part to the lack of standardized methods for identification. This highly specialized problem results in inferior products entering the marketplace and skewing price points for legitimate goods. One good example of this is Madagascar vanilla, price per kilo has vaulted from $47 in 2012/13 to $385 in 2016/17. This leads to potential counterfeiting and substitution from bad actors/criminals in the food industry. For origin-driven products like spices, food fraud has highlighted the need for ways to defend claims of geographic origin. This study uses three different technologies; microwave digestion, ICP-OES, and ICP-MS, to determine if spice origin from different countries could be accurately distinguished. Spice samples were sourced from a large US importer of spices that can verify the country of origin. The results of this study demonstrate the validity and applicability of the analytical approaches used.
