Detection of soybean oil adulteration in cow ghee (clarified milk fat): an ultrafast study using flash gas chromatography electronic nose coupled with multivariate chemometrics

BACKGROUND Cow ghee is one of the expensive edible fats in the dairy sector. Ghee is often adulterated with low‐priced edible oils, like soybean oil, owing to its high market demand. The existing adulteration detection methods are time‐consuming, requiring sample preparation and expertise in these fields. The possibility of detecting soybean oil adulteration (from 10% to 100%) in pure cow ghee was investigated in this study. The fingerprint information of volatile compounds was collected using a flash gas chromatography electronic nose (FGCEN) instrument. The classification results were studied using the pattern recognition chemometric models principal component analysis (PCA), soft independent modelling of class analogy (SIMCA), and discriminant function analysis (DFA). RESULTS The most powerful fingerprint odor of all the samples identified from FGCEN analysis was acetaldehyde (Z)‐4‐heptenal, 2‐propanol, ethyl propanoate, and pentan‐2‐one. The odor analysis investigation was accomplished with an average analysis time of 90 s. A clear differentiation of all the samples with an excellent classification accuracy of more than 99% was achieved with the PCA and DFA chemometric methods. However, the results of the SIMCA model showed that SIMCA could only be used to detect ghee adulteration at higher concentration levels (30% to 100%). The validation study shows good agreement between FGCEN and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry methods. CONCLUSION The methodology demonstrated coupled with PCA and DFA methods for adulteration detection in ghee using FGCEN apparatus has been an efficient and convenient technique. This study explored the capability of the FGCEN instrument to tackle the adulteration problems in ghee. © 2022 Society of Chemical Industry.