Evaluation of FT-IR spectroscopy combined with SIMCA and PLS‑DA for detection of adulterants in pistachio butter

This work scrutinized the adulteration of pistachio butter with three potential edible oils using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and multivariate classification methods. Each of the classes, including non-adulterated samples and adulterated samples consisting of pistachio butter mixed with various concentrations of peanut oil, corn oil and sunflower oil, were classified. For this purpose, multivariate methods, including soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), were applied to classify the FTIR data. After evaluating the model on unknown samples, the results indicated that PLS-DA was better than the SIMCA model. The classification efficiency of 98% was obtained using the PLS-DA algorithm compared to the SIMCA model with 91% efficiency for prediction. According to the results FTIR spectroscopy, accompanied by multivariate classification methods, can be used as a rapid and reliable method for classifying and predicting adulteration in pistachio butter with edible oils.