Fruit juice adulteration has been a long-standing concern since the morphological and physical properties of the original ingredients are removed completely during processing. Various traceability and risk assessment systems have been developed to prevent general food fraud. With rapid globalization and complex supply chain, functions of those systems have been inevitably hindered. Serving as the last barrier to ensure food authenticity, reliable techniques to identify fraudulent fruit juice are indispensable. Techniques for fruit juice authentication can be categorized into nucleic acid-based and metabolite-based, utilizing polymerase chain reaction and gas/liquid chromatography-hyphenated tools, respectively. These traditional techniques suffer from time-consuming and labor-intensive experimental procedures and/or with low accuracy, sensitivity and/or specificity, hindering their application by inspection agencies and the food industry. To address these issues, two novel authentication tools were developed. One method combines isothermal DNA amplification technique and microfluidic platform to authenticate pure pomegranate juice and identify the potential adulterants of apple and grape juice. The multi-channel microfluidic platform enabled an instrumental-free sample-to-answer analysis of pomegranate juice within 1 h with high sensitivity and specificity. Another novel technique was developed using comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to authenticate orange juice. With substantially improved separation efficiency and molecular resolution, this metabolite-based technique achieved accurate identification of the biological species, geographical origin and harvesting year of orange juice. These novel techniques have high potential to be adapted by inspection agencies, the food industry, and even consumers to authenticate fruit juice products in a simple and reliable manner.

Advancement of techniques for fruit juice authentication – the last barrier to prevent food fraud

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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