Legal blends between olive and sunflower oils (2021)

Abstract

These data were generated in our lab, with the help of several laboratory assistants and master students, within the OLEUM project (http://www.oleumproject.eu): ‘Advanced solutions for assuring the authenticity and quality of olive oil at a global scale’ . The general objectives of the Project focus on olive oil fraud detection in a way that it improves the existing analytical methods and has developed new strategies of analysis. It has been organized in seven work packages distributed in a number of tasks. This work is within Work Package 4 (‘Analytical solution addressing olive oil authentication issues’), and it concentrates on the study of legal blends between olive oils and other vegetable oils.

The notion of legal blends comes from the authorization of the European Commission to market blends of olive oil with other vegetable oils and to emphasize the presence of olive oil in a place other than in the ingredient list, only if it accounts for at least 50 % of the blend (Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 29/2012 of 13 January 2012 on marketing standards for olive oil. Official Journal of the European Union L12, 14-21). This evinced a key weakness in the olive oil control chain: The lack of analytical methods to demonstrate the amount of such oil in declared mixtures. In this way, it was the purpose of this work to look for an analytical strategy that helped us to confirm if the amount of olive oil in a label-claimed blend was at least 50 %. In order to do that we used two of the most representative seed oils: normal type and high oleic sunflower oils (NTSO and HOSO, respectively), mixed on the one hand with olive oil (OO), and on the other hand with extra virgin olive oil (EVOO), at 60:40, 50:50, and 40:60 v/v proportions. We demonstrated that there was no need of developing new methods of analysis but that it was enough to combine four of the official purity parameters described in the legislation (International Olive Council (2016). Trade standard applying to olive oils and olive pomace oils. COI/T.15/NC No 3/Rev. 11, 1-17). Those parameters were: triacylglycerols (TAG), acyclic saturated hydrocarbons (SHC), free sterols (FS), and tocopherols (TCPH). They were also organized them in the form of decisional trees in a way that the blend who claimed to be composed of at least 50 % olive oil must comply not just with one but with the four of them (Food Chemistry, volume 315, 15 June 2020, 126235). Samples were provided by Fera (Fera Science Ltd, Sand Hutton, York)