Abstract

Flavor is commonly used as a food additive to impart a distinctive taste. Minor differences in the chemical profile of imitation flavors may severely affect the final food quality. Thus, similarity evaluation of flavor compounds is key to maintaining quality control in the food industry. In this study, a similarity evaluation method was developed, which incorporates non-targeted gas chromatography-Orbitrap for high-resolution mass-based fingerprinting and multivariate statistical analysis, including the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, hierarchical cluster analysis, and principal component analysis. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient of historical batches greater than 0.8 were integrated to the chromatographic fingerprint, while hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis were used to evaluate the similarities between the reference samples and imitation flavors. Eight batches of samples were tested, and the results of all samples were included in the chromatographic fingerprint. Three imitation samples were successfully identified by hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis. The developed method provides a tool for the accurate evaluation of the quality of imitation flavor compounds in food.