Pomodoro di Pachino: An Authentication Study Using 1H-NMR and Chemometrics – Protecting its P.G.I. European Certification

In recent years the problem of the objective assessment of authenticity of agro-food products has increased drastically. Due to the global market, the spreading of foodstuffs that were previously localized to well-defined geographical areas is made possible, and with this globalisation attempts to imitate high-quality food products are ever increasing. The European logos identifying Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) collective marks have been developed and used for branding those European food products that fulfill the requested and certified characteristics. In the present work the authenticity of the Italian cherry tomato “pomodoro di Pachino” with respect to some other Italian cherry tomatoes has been investigated utilizing proton High Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (1H HR NMR) as the analytical method and chemometrics as a tool for analyzing and interpreting the acquired multivariate data. The results indicate that the tomatoes produced in the Pachino area, indeed, are different, in terms of chemical quality, from all the non-authentic tomatoes investigated in this study.