product, but also its quality; in fact, a PDO-designed olive oil must be produced according to several strictly enforced standards, within the entire processing cycle from harvesting to bottling, which are stated and laid down in a specific set of rules.
In order to assure product quality and to safeguard consumers from commercial frauds, analytical tools able to verify whether an oil, sold with a specific PDO label, is actually compatible with that PDO claim or not are needed.
Classical chemical analysis, including fatty acids, sterols and triterpenic alcohols determinations, followed by a proper appli-cation of chemometric pattern recognition strategies, have widely demonstrated to be excellent tools for recognizing the geo-graphical origin of olive oils [5,6]. Nevertheless, traditional analysis for food authentication have several drawbacks, the most sig-nificant of which are low speed, the necessity for sample pre-treatments, a requirement for highly-skilled personnel and de-struction of the sample [7].
Several fast and non-destructive instrumental methods have been proposed to overcome these hurdles. Between them, artificial noses, infrared and UV–visible spectroscopy have proven to be successful analytical methods for analyses of olive oil. All these techniques give non-specific fingerprints of oil samples, which, by means of multivariate data analysis, provide useful information for
Several fast and non-destructive instrumental methods have been proposed to overcome these hurdles. Between them, artificial noses, infrared and UV–visible spectroscopy have proven to be successful analytical methods for analyses of olive oil. All these techniques give non-specific fingerprints of oil samples, which, by means of multivariate data analysis, provide useful information for