P66: CURRENT STATUS AND FUTURE NEEDS IN THE ASSESMENT OF SAFFRON QUALITY PARAMETERS INCLUDED IN THE ISO 3632: 'SAFFRON (CROCUS SATIVUS L.)'

摘要

For more than two decades, commercial transactions of the highly valuable spice saffron rely on the quality parameters specified in the trade standard ISO 3632, that are (a) coloring strength, (b) flavor and (c) aroma strength. These traits, associated with the content of saffron aqueous extracts in sugar esters of trans- and cis-crocetin (crocins), picrocrocin and safranal are tentatively estimated and expressed as E~(1%) values at 440 nm, 257 nm and 330 nm, respectively. However, the ISO-suggested methodology has been repeatedly criticized in the relevant scientific literature as non-specific and non-accurate. In this study, we propose an improvement for the quantification of total crocetin esters and picrocrocin content using the ISO-suggested extraction protocol along with UV-Vis spectrophotometry and external standard method with in-house isolated compounds (trans-crocetin (di-β-D-gentiobiosyl) ester and picrocrocin). The results, expressed as absolute weight values are compared with those obtained using the external standard method after RP-HPLC-DAD analysis. Our approach is in line with the current food legislation requirements for accurate determination of analytes and avoidance of estimations.