Quality control of roasted and ground coffee using portable spectrometric methods

• Grant number: 25/05387-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: April 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Chemistry - Analytical Chemistry
• Principal Investigator: Marcelo Braga Bueno Guerra
• Grantee: Vithória Gomes da Fonseca
• Host Institution: Escola de Ciências Agrárias. Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA). Lavras , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 21/06968-3 - From seed to cup: internet of things technology in the quality coffee production chain, AP.TEM

Abstract

Coffee is one of the country's main agricultural commodities. Roasted and ground coffee is a product of high consumption by Brazilian society, which has currently received a lot of media attention due to the high prices charged on the market and also due to the discovery of fraud by federal inspection agencies. Given this scenario, this research project aims to propose fast, highly accurate analytical methods that can be used in situ to detect and quantify impurities in samples of roasted and ground coffee intended for human consumption. The following portable equipment will be used for this purpose: X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer (pXRF) and Spectroradiometer to measure reflectance in the visible and near-infrared regions. A partnership will be established with the Coffee Sector of UFLA, which will provide samples of raw coffee from various regions of the state of Minas Gerais. These samples will be roasted and ground, and several frauds will be simulated using the main adulterants used by the offenders, namely roasted coffee husks and roasted corn. The original samples and the fraud simulations will be analyzed by the aforementioned portable equipment. Chemometric classification tools, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA), will be used to verify the ability of the analytical techniques to identify frauds in the selected coffee samples. It is expected that the analytical strategies tested in this project will be adopted in the future by regulatory agencies for the rapid identification, with minimal sample preparation, of frauds in this important product.