Qualitative and quantitative analysis of peanut adulteration in almond powder samples using multi-elemental fingerprinting combined with multivariate data analysis methods

- Detection of peanut adulteration in almond powder by multi-elemental fingerprinting.
- PCA and LDA were able to differentiate the adulterated samples.
- Detection of adulteration up to the level of 5% was possible using LS-SVM model.
- The effective elements in differentiating almond and peanut samples were determined.

In this study, adulteration of almond powder samples with peanut was analyzed using multi-elemental fingerprinting based on inductively coupled plasma optical emission measurements (ICP-OES) combined with chemometric methods. The ability of multivariate data analysis approaches, such as principal component analysis (PCA) and principal component analysis-linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA), to achieve differentiation of samples and as partial least squares (PLS) and least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), to quantify the adulteration based on the elemental contents has been investigated. Ten variables i.e. the contents of B, Na, Mg, K, Ca, Fe, Cu, Cu, Zn and Sr at μg g−1 level, determined by ICP-OES were used. Different almond and peanut samples were then mixed at various ratios to obtain mixtures ranging from 95/5 to 5/95 w/w and PCA-LDA was applied to classify the almonds, peanuts and adulterated samples. This method was able to differentiate peanut and almond samples from the adulterated samples. PLS and LS-SVM models were developed to quantify the adulteration ratios of almond using a training set and the constructed models were evaluated using a validation set. The root mean squared error of prediction (RMSEP) and the coefficient of determination (R2) of the validation set for PLS and LS-SVM were 3.81, 0.986 and 1.66, 0.997, respectively, which demonstrates the superiority of the LS-SVM model. The results show that the combination of multi-elemental fingerprinting with multivariate data analysis methods can be applied as an effective and feasible method for testing almond adulteration.