Fingerprinting of fatty acid composition for the verification of the identity of organic eggs

Organic products (such as organic eggs) usually have a higher price than the corresponding conventional products. This makes organic products susceptible to fraud. Administrative controls are conducted to detect this type of frauds. However, an analytical verification of the organic identity of food products would be very useful in this respect. It is unlikely that there is a single compound, or a few compounds, that differ sufficiently between organic and conventional eggs to be used as a marker of organic identity. Instead, fingerprinting of the organic products (that is to say, analyzing a wide range of compounds instead of only a few) might be used as a tool for their verification. Here, we have used the fatty acid composition of egg yolks as a fingerprint to verify the organic identity of eggs. From the fingerprints, chemometric models were built which predict the identity of eggs (organic or conventional) with high success rates.