The estimation of the composition of edible oil mixtures

Abstract

Abstract The fatty acid, sterol and tocopherol contents of edible oils were used to determine the composition of oil mixtures by means of a weighted least squares estimator with backwards elimination. The model was tested on 93 samples containing known amounts of sunflowerseed oil, groundnut oil, soybean oil, cottonseed oil, maize oil, olive oil and palm oil. Of these samples 75 were binary mixtures, seven were ternary mixtures, one contained seven oils and 10 were pure oils. Satisfactory results were obtained with 79 of the 93 samples (85%). The differences between the actual and estimated concentrations of the main components were greater than 2.7 times the standard error for six samples; the mean of the absolute differences was 4.7% for all 93 samples. The use of this model is considered superior to the matching of a fatty acid composition, but the model still needs a lot of development.