Project abstract

The global herb and spice industry is evaluated at around US$4 billion, being in expansion. At the EU level, an important quantity (in 2019, around 380k tons) of these types of commodities was imported mostly from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Owing to growing demands and driven by the desire of unfair producers/traders to get an illicit profit and in parallel with an ineffective action taken by the control authorities on the supply chain, adulterated herbs or spices are released on the market. Thus, spices are one of the food products that are the most prone to falsification. The general objective of the present project consists in the development of new robust analytical tools able to assess the authenticity and quality of some of the most widely consumed grounded spices and herbs (pepper, paprika, garlic, basil, oregano, lovage) commercialized on the Romanian market. For this purpose, more than 600 samples will be analyzed by IRMS and ICP-MS, as well as through vibrational spectroscopy. The huge amount of generated experimental data will be exploited using advanced statistical tools, AI, as well as data fusion strategies, to extract meaningful information that can be used to detect the most subtle adulteration attempts, like partial substitution of spices with cheaper ingredients. Apart from the development of reliable recognition tools, the project aims to perform the first survey concerning the toxicity effects of the investigated spices, from the Romanian market.