Absorption spectra of edible oils on UV-visible-near infrared region

Abstract

Edible oil forgery is a prominent issue of food production bussiness. In order to lower the production cost and increase the apparent value, some cheap substance is added on the edible oil production and it was mislabelled. Current techniques are able to differentiate each type of edible oils based on its physical characteristics. However, they need special treatment of samples and costly. In this paper, the optical characteristic of absorption of animal-based and plantbased oils are investigated to obtain fingerprints on UV-visible-near infrared wavelength region. Either animal-based or plant-based oils have absorption on wavelength region of 900 – 940 nm. However, each type of oils has unique absorption characteristics on wavelength region of 350 – 700 nm. Hence, the UV-visible region can be used as the marker of each type of edible oils.