Measuring the colour of virgin olive oils in a new colour scale using a low-cost portable electronic device

Abstract The Modified Uniform Oil Colour Scale (MUOCS) is proposed for the colour specification of virgin olive oils. MUOCS has 60 standard colours, the same number as the two previous scales available for the same purpose: Uniform Oil Colour Scale (UOCS) and Bromthymol Blue (BTB). A remarkable improvement in accuracy can be achieved from MUOCS standards: For a broad dataset of 1700 virgin olive oils produced in Spain during four different harvests, the average colour differences to the closest standards were 2.86, 3.99, and 8.17 CIELAB units using MUOCS, UOCS and BTB, respectively. A low-cost (