Detection of volatile organic compounds in adulterated tea using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and Proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry

•This is the first time to judge the quality of tea by VOCs generated.•PTR-MS and FTIR were used to identify whether teas are adulterated with essence.•Both methods can be used for real-time monitoring.•FTIR technology has the potential to develop miniaturization. Aroma is a key factor used to evaluate tea quality. Illegal traders usually add essence to expired or substandard tea to improve its aroma so as to gain more profit. Traditional physical and chemical testing methods are time-consuming and costly. Furthermore, rapid detection techniques, such as near-infrared spectroscopy and machine vision, can only be used to detect adulterated powdered solid essences in tea. In this study, proton-transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) were employed to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in samples, and rapid detection of different tea adulterated liquid essence was achieved. The prediction accuracies of PTR-MS and FTIR reached over 0.941 and 0.957, respectively, and the minimum detection limits were lower than the actual used values in both. In this study, the different application scenarios of the two technologies are discussed based on their performance characteristics.