Authentication ofGreek PDO KalamataTable Olives: A Novel Non-Target High Resolution Mass Spectrometric Approach

Food science continually requires the development of novel analytical methods to prevent fraudulent actions and guarantee food authenticity. Greek table olives, one of the most emblematic and valuable Greek national products, are often subjected to economically motivated fraud. In this work, a novel ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole time of flight tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QTOF-MS) analytical method was developed to detect the mislabeling ofGreek PDO Kalamata table olives, and thereby establish their authenticity. A non-targeted screening workflow was applied, coupled to advanced chemometric techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Square Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) in order to fingerprint and accurately discriminatePDOGreekKalamataolives fromKalamata (or Kalamon) typeolives from Egypt and Chile. The method performance was evaluated using a target set of phenolic compounds and several validation parameters were calculated. Overall, 65 table olive samples from Greece, Egypt, and Chile were analyzed and processed for the model development and its accuracy was validated. The robustness of the chemometric model was tested using 11 GreekKalamonolive samples that were produced during the following crop year, 2018, and they were successfully classified as GreekKalamonolives from Kalamata. Twenty-six characteristic authenticity markers were indicated to be responsible for the discrimination ofKalamonolives of different geographical origins.