Description
Fish and related products have become categories of food among the most vulnerable to frauds (FAO, 2018). Examples of fraudolent practices are species substitution or mislabelling. Until now several spectroscopic techniques in conjunction with chemometrics have been used to evaluate the quality or the authenticity of seafood products such as vibrational, fluorescence and ultraviolet/visible absorption. Based on this background, in this study a method to distinguish between different types of fish fillets was developed. Five species were selected: Epinephelus costae; Gadus morhua; Pleuronectes platessa; Synaptura cadenati and Chelidonichthys lucerna. The analyses were performed by using three different types of NIR instrument: a bench NIR, a portable micro-NIR and a handheld NIR (SCiO) on 50 samples for each category. Using a chemometric approach to analyse the NIR data, good identification performances were obtained, in fact each NIR instrument allowed to classify fish fillets with an overall accuracy ranging from 65% up to 93%. The proposed method can help in fighting commercial frauds in fish market throughout the entire commercial chain.
