Phenolic profile as a tool to study the homogeneity of extra-virgin olive oils belonging to different Spanish and Italian PDOs

To belong to a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) has become very important for food, as one today´s major problems in the agricultural-food industry is to set down objective tools in order to determine the traceability of raw materials as well as finished products so that we can follow the products from the producer to the consumer. There is a great interest in foods that belong to a PDO because the quality and other essential and exclusive characteristics due to a particular geographical environment are guaranteed. We have used a capillary electrophoretic method for the simple,rapid and simultaneous characterization and quantification of the polyphenolic fraction of extra-virgin olive oil from different PDOs. To demonstrate the usefulness of this method, we have analyzed sixteen samples of a Spanish PDO and other nine samples belonging to an Italian POD (n=5). In this way, it was possible to compare the phenolic profiles of the oils of different zones of the same POD, as well as the phenolic profiles of Spanish and Italian extra-virgin olive oils. Multivariate statistics was used for differenciating the oils produced in each PDO. The correlations among several of the phenolic compounds present in the extracts of olive oil and its sensorial properties were checked as well.