The Feasibility of Detecting Chickpea Flour Adulteration by Spectroscopy (420-900 Nm) and Principle Components Analysis Technique

In the confectionary and food industries, chickpea flour has a well-known situation and is at high risk of food fraud when economical issues are concerned. Low prices of wheat and split pea wastes flours compared to chick pea flour are the reasons that these materials are used as common frauds. Demanding of non-destructive methods of quality evaluation and also the increasing trend of the development and production of functional and portable optical equipment were the reasons why this research has been conducted. In this research, the potential of the spectroscopy (420-900 nm) with principle components analysis technique (PCA) and common preprocessing methods to discriminate the samples of chick pea, wheat and split pea flours on 5, 10, 20 and 30% mixing percentage has been studied. The mentioned method on detection of the split pea flour at 30% mixing percentage and lower was unsuccessful but on discrimination of the wheat flour at 30 and 20% mixing percentage was successful and on detection of 5 and 10% by applying preprocessing (SNV/MSC) was successful. The result indicated that there has been a possibility to define an index based on spectral data to detect the wheat flour in chick pea flour in 430-480 nm band, therefore there is a potential to replace experimental methods with fast and nondestructive spectroscopy (420-900 nm) with PCA.