Legal blends between olive oil and other vegetable oils: Quantification of olive oil and identification of "virgin olive oils", "refined olive oils" and "olive pomace oils"

Abstract The development of a standardized method for quantification of olive oil in legal blends with other vegetable oils is required for the marketing of these products according to the European Legislation and, therefore, to protect the consumer. In this paper triacylglycerols, fatty acids, waxes, squalene and the total esterified sterols were analysed and processed by chemometrics tools. PCA highlighted a trend in separation of samples according to their percentage of olive oil. Quantification was done by PLS, giving a prediction error lower than 5% in a calibration range from 25% to 80% of olive oil. Therefore, the proposed method is suitable to resolve legal blends. Furthermore, although not yet required by the EU legislation, a method was developed for the identification of "virgin olive oils", "refined olive oils" and "olive pomace oils" in blends, using SIMCA; 86.67% of the external test set was correctly classified.