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Identification of adulterations in roasted coffee by gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry

Abstract:

Globally, coffee is the second most commercialized product after crude oil. Nevertheless, due to its high price, this product is usually adulterated with lower-cost products. The objective of the present study was to develop a method based on the combination of solid phase microextraction (SPME) with gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and principal component analysis (PCA), to detect the presence of faba beans and/or barley in roasted coffee. In addition, the SPME of volatile coffee compounds was optimized using the response surface methodology. The optimized SPME conditions were 16 min as conditioning time and 35 min as extraction time. Besides, 44, 36 and 24 compounds were identified, in coffee, barley and bean, respectively. Finally, the developed method allowed detecting the probable presence of faba bean in four commercial coffee samples. To our knowledge, this is the first time that volatile compounds have been described in roasted faba bean. In addition, the presence of barley in these samples was ruled out.