Vol. 11, Special Issue 8 (2022)

Author(s):
Abhilash Arbal, M Tito Anand and R Vidyalakshmi

Abstract:
For many years, inexpensive adulterants have tainted coffee. Fourier transform mid-infrared (FT-MIR) is employed for qualitative detection of Brown Sugar (BS) adulteration in Pure Coffee (PC) due to the effectiveness of spectroscopic technologies as quick and effective routine approaches in the domain of food adulteration. Nutritionally, there is a considerable difference between BS and PC. Even though there are some available microscopic methods to detect adulteration of different adulterants, ATR-FTIR was recognized as a beneficial tool for detecting adulteration of BS in PC. PC, BS, and different percentages of spiked coffee (10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%) were subjected to proximate in parallel with FT-IR spectroscopy. The spectroscopy results showed that BS was detected from PC by the nearly disappearing specific bands at 2920 cm^-1, 1658 cm^-1, 1746 cm^-1, and 1658 cm^-1, which are present in Pure Coffee. The intensity of peaks at these specific bands kept decreasing on increasing the adulteration. As FTIR is a fast and non-destructive technique, it can be employed to find BS adulteration in PC.