Detection of Lard in Ink Extracted from Printed Food Packaging Using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy and Multivariate Analysis

Abstract EN

Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy combined with chemometrics was utilised to discriminate the presence of lard in extracted ink of printed food packaging.

Two spectral regions (full spectra, 3999–649 cm−1, and combination of two regions, 3110–2630 cm−1 and 1940–649 cm−1) of lard, commercial gravure ink, and the blends of both were selected and used to develop a Soft Independent Modelling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) model.

The score plots obtained from the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) revealed that the maximum number of factors (7 factors) was needed to explain 84% of the total variance.

SIMCA was employed as the method to classify the samples into their specific groups.

Si versus Hi plots showed that the calibration standards can be classified as lard-containing standards.

Sample 2 was deduced to have the highest possibility of containing lard, while only samples 5 and 7 cannot be classified as lard-containing samples.

These results demonstrated that FTIR spectroscopy, when combined with multivariate analysis, can provide a rapid method with no excessive sample preparation to detect the presence of lard in ink of foodstuff packaging.