Applications of UV–visible, fluorescence and mid-infrared spectroscopic methods combined with chemometrics for the authentication of apple vinegar

Spectroscopic techniques as untargeted methods have great potential in food authentication studies, and the evaluation of spectroscopic data with chemometric methods can provide accurate predictions of adulteration even for hard-to-identify cases such as the mixing of vinegar with adulterants having a very similar chemical nature. In this study, we aimed to compare the performances of three spectroscopic methods (fluorescence, UV–visible, mid-infrared) in the detection of acetic-acid/apple-vinegar and spirit-vinegar/apple-vinegar mixtures (1–50%). Data obtained with the three spectroscopic techniques were used in the generation of classification models with partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and orthogonal partial least square discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) to differentiate authentic and mixed samples. An improved classification approach was used in choosing the best models through a number of calibration and validation sets. Only the mid-infrared data provided robust and accurate classification models with a high classification rate (up to 96%), sensitivity (1) and specificity (up to 0.96) for the differentiation of the adulterated samples from authentic apple vinegars. Therefore, it was concluded that mid-infrared spectroscopy is a useful tool for the rapid authentication of apple vinegars and it is essential to test classification models with different datasets to obtain a robust model. © 2023 by the authors.