In the present work a new methodology for the qualitative analysis of food essences is presented, using a mid-infrared spectroscopy associated to the multivaried analysis. This method presents the main advantages: not to destroy the sample, it has a lower cost, it makes the analysis quicker and does not produce residues. Taking this into account, different lots of samples of food essences of vanilla, milk, caramel, cherry and strawberry were used to acquire the specters with the purpose of developing models and validation of the method. Having more significant results, it can be observed that the used method not only discriminates the different essences (due to the composition), but also the origin and uniformity of the same ones.
food essence; quality control; infrared; discriminant analysis; multivariate analysis
