Within our research area on food authentication, we are conducting a research project to find new analytical tools to answer the question: Is it trully Bellota Iberian ham (from pigs fed acorns)? Food products with added-value are susceptible to fraud, so having tools to detect fraud reduces fraud possibilites increasing the protection of consumers.

This week, an article describing the firsts results of this project has been published:

Authentication of Iberian dry-cured ham: New approaches by polymorphic fingerprint and ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry

Bayes L, Tres A, Vichi S, Calvet MT, Cuevas-Diarte MA, Codony R, Boatella J, Caixach J, Ueno, S, Guardiola F.
Food Control, 2016, 60: 370-377

DOI: 10.1016/j.foodcont.2015.07.047

The journal offers it for free until October 14th, 2015. Click here to get it!!

This work presents new approaches to detect food fraud. The work deals with the problem from a multidisciplinary point of view. Thus, several crystallographic and analytical methods rarely applied to food authentication were assayed. In addition, these techniques were combined with chemometrics, using in some cases the state-of-the-art chemometric strategy in food authentication, which relies on finding a pattern in the raw analytical signal characteristic of the authentic product (fingerprint).
As a model to assay these new techniques for food authentication, we used two categories of Iberian dry-cured ham (Cebo and Bellota). With this model, the differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) thermograms of the lipid fraction provided fingerprints able to discriminate between both categories. Several crystallographic techniques (synchrotron radiation and laboratory-scale X-ray diffraction, and thermo-optical polarized microscopy) were used to characterize the crystallization, transformation and melting processes recorded by the DSC thermograms. The triacylglycerol composition determined by ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry (UHRMS) was also able to discriminate between both categories. Thus, these determinations, in combination with chemometrics, may prove extremely useful to authenticate many foods containing high to moderate amounts of lipids, such as foods of animal origin.