A first approach towards the development of geographical origin tracing models for North Moroccan olive oils based on triacylglycerols profiles

Abstract

The triacylglycerols composition of monovarietal Picholine Marocaine olive oils, produced in seven of the most productive areas in northern Morocco, has been established for the first time, starting a register of typicality and geographical identity of Moroccan olive oils. Two hundred seventy-nine olive samples were collected over two consecutive crop seasons (2011/2012 (n ¼ 140) and 2012/2013 (n ¼ 139)), the analysis of the triacylglycerol profiles of the obtained oils was performed using high performance liquid chromatography, the influence of the region of provenance was investigated, and chemometric data analysis (including principal components analysis, linear discriminant analysis, partial least squares-discriminant analysis, and soft independent modeling of class analogies) was used to differentiate the studied samples according to their geographical origin. Twenty-one triacylglycerols were characterized and the variability observed among the studied samples could be related to the production area. The combination of triacylglycerols composition with chemometrics provided a powerful tool to verify the geographical origin of north Moroccan olive oils.Practical applications: Moroccan legislations established Geographic Indication labels for adding value to typical products. However, the general procedure to control the geographical authenticity of these protected products remains based on the traceability of their production and there is a lack of appropriate and reliable tools for their geographical unambiguous authentication and control. In this work, geographical authentication models for classifying olive oil samples (based on triacylglycerols composition) have been developed and evaluated, achieving adequate classification and prediction rates for oils coming from the main north Moroccan olive growing areas. The results obtained herein, could represent a significant contribution to the control of the geographical authenticity of Moroccan olive oils.

Assessment of Vibrational Spectroscopy Performance in Geographical Identification of Virgin Olive Oils: A World Level Study

“…The trilinolein content of virgin olive oil is usually less than 0.3% and it can be also used as an indication of possible adulteration of oils of foreign origin . This result confirms the findings of studies based on HPLC that used the presence of trilinolein content as a first approach toward the development of geographical origin tracing models in olive oils …”

Exploring the Capability of LC‐MS and GC‐MS Multi‐Class Methods to Discriminate Virgin Olive Oils from Different Geographical Indications and to Identify Potential Origin Markers

“…[15] Having in mind the complexity of VOO matrix, the use of different metabolomic approaches giving comprehensive information about the sample under study (mainly, but not exclusively, based on MS or NMR and chemometrics) has been proposed as a way to address the problem of origin mislabeling in the olive oil sector. [21] It is worthy to mention some other interesting examples illustrating the differentiation of VOO samples according to their geographical provenance based on the determination of specific chemical classes (triacylglycerols, [22] fatty acids, [23] esterified sterols, [24] or volatile compounds [25,26] ). [17,18] Phenolic compounds profiling combined with PCA and LDA has been pointed out as a very promising approach in origin authentication studies too.…”

Geographical Indication Labels in Moroccan Olive Oil Sector: Territorial Dimension and Characterization of Typicality: A Case Study of Meknès Region

“…It was demonstrated that, for most of the considered regions in the study, useful information could be extracted from TAG data for the geographical discrimination of their virgin olive oils. When considering Meknès terroir samples, rates of 93.48% in both classification and cross-validation and 82.61%, in external validation, were obtained [38].…”