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Almond flour is a high value product susceptible to adulteration. Brazilian researchers have developed methods for the determination of almond flour adulteration, using near infrared spectroscopy (NIR). Three different portable NIR instruments were evaluated to verify the authenticity of almond flours, and the results were compared with a benchtop FT-NIR (Fourier Transform Near Infrared) spectrometer.  Fifty-four almond flours of different varieties were adulterated with low-cost flours widely consumed in Brazil. Different one class chemometric models were used to analyse the spectra. The classification results achieved 100% sensitivity and more than 95% specificity for samples with adulterant concentration of 5% (w/w) or above. Further analysis by PLSR (partial least squares regression)  models was employed to quantify almond flour purity content.

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Crude red palm oil is a traditional cooking oil in many tropical countries especially in West Africa. Ghanaian researchers (in cooperation with Queens University Belfast) have developed a rapid, non-destructive method to detect Sudan dye adulteration of red palm oil using a portable NIR spectrometer with multivariate analysis. The multivariate model was determined using a total of 520 samples of red palm oil comprising; 40 authentic samples together with 480 adulterated samples containing Sudan dyes (I, II, III, IV of 120 samples each). Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to extract relevant spectral information, which gave visible cluster trends for authentic samples and adulterated ones.  The optimised results by cross-validation revealed that MSC-PCA + SVM (Support Vector Machine) gave an identification rate above 95% for both calibration and prediction sets, and hence ould be used successfully to differentiate between authentic red palm oils and adulterated ones. 

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