The identification of soy sauce adulterated with bean species and the origin using headspace solid-phase microextraction coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

Soy sauce is one of the significant seasonings in Asia but is often mislabeled in ingredients or substituted with geographical information. With no adequate methods to distinguish the bean sources and the origins of soy sauce, our study designed a seamless headspace solid-phase microextraction coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (HS-SPME/GC-MS) for analyzing unique volatile components of different soy sauces. Over 400 volatile flavor compounds were identified and the assistance of chemometric analysis successfully discriminated different bean sources (black bean and soybean) and producing regions (Taiwan and Japan). The chemometric models can also perfectly evaluate real samples together with adulterated samples. In brief, these soy sauce volatile signatures can solve the problem of authentication and assist the whole industry in preventing adulteration and producing countries' counterfeit.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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