Innovative and sustainable solutions for quality control of virgin olive oils and valorization of olive pomace

This thesis reports the main results of the research activities carried out during the presented Ph.D. project. In this work, innovative solutions for quality control of virgin olive oils and technological valorization of olive pomace were investigated in the food sciences and technology context. Concerning the quality control of virgin olive oils, the conducted studies were aimed to the development and application of innovative, rapid, and sustainable analytical instrumental methods to support the sensory analysis (Panel test). In particular, a focus was carried out on the study of the volatile fraction by gas-chromatographic analyses, such as HS-GC-IMS and Flash-GC, and an additional one based on spectroscopic techniques, i.e. FT-IR, NIR, and FT-Raman, as relevant potential tools in the determination of the commercial category of virgin olive oils. The final aim is to propose the investigated techniques as screening methods to pre-classify the samples in combination with the Panel test to speed up and simplify the quality control procedures carried out by laboratories and companies of the olive oil sector. Moreover, the activity regarding the technological valorization of olive pomace was focused on the set-up of sustainable methods for the extraction of phenolic compounds (i.e. by a mechanical approach and using less toxic solvents than those usually adopted) by obtaining extracts rich in phenolic compounds, potentially usable in different industrial sectors, such as pharmaceutical, food and cosmetic, as well as the characterization and stability evaluation of the so obtained phenolic extracts. This activity was aimed to the recovery of valuable phenolic compounds from this by-product in a circular economy perspective; since, even if olive mill pomace represents an important environmental problem, it still contains molecules, i.e. phenolic compounds, widely recognised for their healthy properties (e.g. antioxidant activity).