A 'Fingerprint' for Fruit Juices

Adulterations or other possible food frauds are a financial problem that affects many foodstuffs. This is why achieving the verification of food products is of great importance.

In the case of fruit juices the most common type of adulteration is mixing the original juice with juices from other, cheaper fruits (mainly grapefruit, grape or pear); in other words, falsifying the juice.

Among the chemical methods of verification, there are two different strategies. On the one hand, the employment of markers — chemical compounds that are ideally specific for or exclusive to each fruit and that can be rapidly, safely and cheaply measured and analyzed.

On many occasions, however, it is not possible to find markers that fulfill these requirements and, so, another approach to verification methods is to measure and analyze a greater number of chemical compounds that make up the characteristic profile of each fruit or fruit juice. The complexity of this requires the employment of chemical analysis techniques and highly sophisticated statistical tools.

In order to confirm the authenticity of the fruit juices, researchers at the Department of Analytical Chemistry of the University of the Basque Country (EHU-UPV) are trying to identify their “fingerprints,” using a family of chemical compounds naturally present in all fruit and known as polyphenols. There are thousands of polyphenols in the various species in the vegetable kingdom, with differences both in the number of particular polyphenols present in each vegetable species as well as in the quantities found. Thus, different fruits have specific polyphenolic differences.

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