Comprehensive analysis to determine the differences of solar salt produced in South Korea and China

Food fraud, including adulteration, addition, tampering, and misrepresentation of food ingredients and packaging for improper economic profit, has been global concerns affecting public health and safety. In South Korea, counterfeit expression of solar salt has been a problem causing improper economic profit, especially for those products produced from China, but labeled as ‘domestics’. In this study, we were tried to discriminate geographical origins of solar salt between South Korea and China through various analytical techniques, the determination of moisture and sodium chloride contents, multi-elemental analysis, and isotope analysis. With the application of a statistical analysis, more than 93.3% of discrimination capability of positive classification was achieved in this study.