Cocoa smoky off-flavour: A MS-based analytical decision maker for routine controls

Cocoa smoky off-flavour is generated from an inappropriate artificial drying applied on beans to speeding up the post-harvest process and it can affect the quality of the chocolate. The sensory tests are time-consuming, and at present, a fast analytical method to detect this defect in raw materials is not yet available. This study applies a HS-SPME-MS-enose in combination with chemometrics to obtain diagnostic mass-spectral patterns to detect smoked samples and/or as analytical decision maker. SIMCA models provide the best classification results, compared to PLS-DA, with sensitivities exceeding 90% and a high class specificity range of 89–100% depending on the matrix investigated (beans or liquors). Resulting diagnostic ions were related to phenolic derivatives. The discrimination ability of the method has been confirmed by a quantitative analysis through HS-SPME-GC–MS. HS-SPME-MS-enose turned out to be a fast, cost-effective and objective approach for high throughput analytical screening to discard defective cocoa samples.