Authenticity and Quality of Edible Oils: Research Update

Dear Colleagues,

Authenticity or food fraud and quality are two aspects that should be considered together when describing the integrity of edible oils. Both aspects are usually not health related, but the motivation for food fraud is to deceive the customer to maximize profit, while quality degradation usually happens unintentionally. However, it is necessary to have efficient methods to ensure the quality and authenticity of edible oils. This is especially true for high-priced oils such as olive oil, argan oil, or nut oils.

At present, many standard methods are available to prove the quality of edible oils regarding sensory quality, oxidative state, or identity, but most of these methods consider the quality of oils one-dimensionally on the basis of individual quality parameters. This makes it easy for counterfeiters, as they know based on the existing limits and standards what to look out for and what the investigations will focus on. A new emerging and promising approach seems to be combining (un-)targeted methods with multivariate statistical tools that track statistical differences between adulterated and authentic edible oils on the basis of several parameters instead of just one. However, targeted methods also have an important role in ensuring the quality and authenticity of fats and oils.

With this Special Issue, we invite authors to submit original papers describing new and innovative analytical methods based on, for example, LC, GC, IMS, PCR, mass spectrometry, or spectroscopic methods such as NMR, FT-IR, or FT-NIR for the detection and assurance of the quality and authenticity of edible oils. This also includes the sensory evaluation of edible oils and its possible support by analytical methods. We also welcome review articles giving an overview on different aspects of the detection of the quality and authenticity of edible oils.

Dr. Bertrand Matthäus
Dr. Ina Willenberg
Guest Editors

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• edible oils and fats
• authenticity
• quality
• analytical methods
• chemometrics
• chromatographic techniques
• spectroscopic methods
• IMS
• NMR
• PCR