Adulteration in Spices and advanced Instrumentation Detection Techniques: A Review

¹ Food Technology, MIT-ADT University, Pune, Maharashtra 412201, India.
² Department of Agronomy, Osun State University, Osogbo, 210001, Nigeria

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^** Co-Correspondence: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract

The production, import, and export of spices occur on a large scale worldwide. Spices are an important component of the diet. But nowadays, spices get affected by different types of adulterants. The most common practice is to intentionally insert inferior, foreign material substitutes or dyes, materials, or elements that reduce the value and quality of spices. Sometimes adulterated spices cause different serious kinds of health issues, such as acting as a cancer-causing agent, hypertension, digestive disorders, and allergies. Also, this kind of activity is undertaken to increase profit and to compete in the market. Various methods can detect adulterants. Some household or do-at-home test available, which are quick, without the use of any instruments, and an inexpensive method to detect whether spices are adulterated. Several chemical methods are used to detect and identify different adulterants in spices. In advanced instrumentation and the digital era, spectroscopic techniques such as UV-VIS, NIR, FTIR, NMR, Raman, Mass, GC-MS, and chromatography techniques such as paper, TLC and HPLC, are often adapted. Other than these techniques, most ongoing research is related to incorporating machine learning, internet of things (IoT), and artificial Intelligence (AI) based solutions for ease of detecting spice adulterants in an advanced way. Recently, to enhance the chemical data collected by chemometrics, random forest as a class classifier, infrared spectroscopy, and electronic nose have also been used to detect spice adulterants. This study provides a thorough note of these methods with a focus on the different analytical techniques used to detect and quantify adulterants in spices.