Fast Discrimination of Chocolate Quality Based on Average-Mass-Spectra Fingerprints of Cocoa Polyphenols
Résumé
This work aims to sort cocoa beans according to chocolate sensory quality and phenolic composition. Prior tothe study, cocoa samples were processed into chocolate in a standard manner, and then the chocolate was characterized bysensory analysis, allowing sorting of the samples into four sensory groups. Two objectives were set:first to use average massspectra as quick cocoa-polyphenol-extractfingerprints and second to use thosefingerprints and chemometrics to select themolecules that discriminate chocolate sensory groups. Sixteen cocoa polyphenol extracts were analyzed by liquidchromatography−low-resolution mass spectrometry. Averaging each mass spectrum provided polyphenolicfingerprints,which were combined into a matrix and processed with chemometrics to select the most meaningful molecules fordiscrimination of the chocolate sensory groups. Forty-four additional cocoa samples were used to validate the previous results.Thefingerprinting method proved to be quick and efficient, and the chemometrics highlighted 29m/zsignals of known andunknown molecules, mainlyflavan-3-ols, enabling sensory-group discrimination.