Evaluation of fresh palm oil adulteration with recycled cooking oil using GC-MS and ATR-FTIR spectroscopy: A review

Palm oil (PO) is an edible vegetable oil that is extracted from the mesocarp of oil palm fruit (Elaeis guineensis), which is known to contain an almost equal proportion of saturated fatty acids (SFAs) and unsaturated fatty acids (USFAs). PO is used globally, because of its wide application as a frying medium. Extracted from the mesocarp of the oil palm fruit, PO needs to be processed to make it of edible quality. However, to meet growing global demand, it is often adulterated with recycled cooking oil (RCO), which is of inedible quality. As the methods of fresh palm olein (FPO) adulteration are sophisticated, it created an urgent need for commensurate analytical techniques with which to detect FPO adulteration. As such, chromatography and spectroscopy are commonly used to detect adulterations in edible oil. Therefore, this study evaluated the efficacy of utilising gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy to detect the adulteration of FPO with inedible RCO. Although previous studies attest to the efficacy of utilising GC-MS and ATR-FTIR spectroscopy in adulteration detection, both these techniques only provided specific qualitative and quantitative insights into the compounds present in oil samples. As such, further extensive studies on the application of a variety of adulteration detection methods are needed to provide regulatory authorities with information on the reliability of these modern adulteration detection methods.