Monitoring olive oils quality and oxidative resistance during storage using an electronic tongue

• EVOO labeling requires the fulfillment of physicochemical legal thresholds.
• Traditional analytical methods are off-line and time-consuming assays.
• EVOO electrochemical fingerprints allow assessing physicochemical quality data.
• MLR-SA models were more accurate than full-sensor models (e.g., PCR and PLS).
• Single E-tongue assay enabled fast monitoring of EVOO quality during storage.

Monitoring olive oils oxidative stability and quality parameters (free acidity, peroxide values, K232 and K270 extinction coefficients) is needed to guarantee that, during storage, their levels remain within the legal thresholds enabling their commercialization as high-value extra-virgin olive oils. Physicochemical levels are assessed using time-consuming routine analytical reference techniques. In this work, the feasibility of a novel approach that merges an electronic tongue and chemometric tools, for monitoring extra-virgin olive oils’ quality along one year of storage at dark or exposed to light is discussed. The results confirmed that physicochemical parameters varied with the storage lighting conditions and more significantly with time. Also, multiple linear regression models, using sub-sets of 22–28 sensors selected with a meta-heuristic simulated annealing algorithm, allow evaluating the storage time-evolution of olive oils’ peroxide values, extinction coefficients and oxidative stabilities with satisfactory accuracy (R2 ≥ 0.98 and ≥ 0.96, for leave-one-out and repeated K-fold cross-validation procedures, respectively). The capability of monitoring, in a single electrochemical assay, legal required quality parameters of olive oils, decreases considerable the analysis time and cost, allowing checking the compliance of extra-virgin olive oil quality with labeling. So, the use of electronic tongues for extra-virgin olive oil shelf-life assessment could be envisaged.