Simultaneous voltammetric determination of four organic acids in fruit juices using multiway calibration

•A new sensitive, fast and inexpensive square wave voltammetric method was developed.•Citric, lactic, malic and tartaric acids were simultaneously determined in fruit juices.•These acids are not electroactive on common electrodes and so CoPC-CPE was used.•The strong overlap of voltammetric signals was overcome using multiway calibration.•Samples were successfully analyzed without any previous pretreatment. A sensitive, fast, and inexpensive square wave voltammetric method using a cobalt phthalocyanine modified carbon paste electrode was developed for simultaneous determination of citric, lactic, malic and tartaric acids in fruit juices. To overcome the strong overlap of voltammetric signals caused by calibrated and uncalibrated constituents, multivariate curve resolution with alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) was used. Data were previous treated for correction of baseline and potential shift. The MCR-ALS calibration models were constructed and evaluated using a validation set obtained from a Taguchi design. The values predicted by the optimized MCR-ALS models were unbiased and no statistically significant difference was observed between proposed and reference methods, applying the paired t-test at a confidence level of 95%. As far as the authors know, a voltammetric method that simultaneously determines four organic acids in complex samples such as fruit juices without any previous pretreatment has not yet been reported in the literature.