EXPRESS: Comparison of Spectroscopic Techniques for Determining the Peroxide Value of 19 Classes of Naturally Aged, Plant-Based Edible Oils

The peroxide value (PV) of edible oils is a measure of the degree of oxidation, which directly relates to the freshness of the oil sample. Several studies previously reported in the literature have paired various spectroscopic techniques with multivariate analyses to rapidly determine PVs using field portable and process instrumentation; those efforts presented ‘best-case’ scenarios with oils from narrowly defined training and test sets. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the use of near- and mid-infrared absorption and Raman scattering spectroscopies on oil samples from different oil classes, including seasonal and vendor variations, to determine which measurement technique, or combination thereof, is best for predicting PVs. Following PV assays of each oil class using an established titration-based method, global and global-subset calibration models were constructed from spectroscopic data collected on the 19 oil classes used in this study. Spectra from each optical technique were used to create partial least squares regression (PLSR) calibration models to predict the PV of unknown oil samples. A global PV model based on near-infrared (8 mm optical path length – OPL) oil measurements produced the lowest RMSEP (4.9), followed by 24 mm OPL near infrared (5.1), Raman (6.9) and 50 μm OPL mid-infrared (7.3). However, it was determined that the Raman RMSEP resulted from chance correlations. Global PV models based on low-level fusion of the NIR (8 and 24 mm OPL) data and all infrared data produced the same RMSEP of 5.1. Global subset models, based on any of the spectroscopies and olive oil training sets from any class (pure, extra light, extra virgin), all failed to extrapolate to the non-olive oils. However, the near-infrared global subset model built on extra virgin olive oil could extrapolate to test samples from other olive oil classes.