Turmeric is widely used for its culinary value and medicinal properties. The limited supply and the complex supply chain makes it highly vulnerable to economically motivated adulteration. In this study, Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy has been combined with chemometrics to detect the Sudan dye, Metanil Yellow and starch adulteration in turmeric powder. The pure turmeric samples were spiked with these adulterants in concentrations ranging from 5-30% and the absorption spectra was collected in the frequency regions of 600-4000 cm-1. The absorption spectra in the fingerprinting region (600-2000 cm-1) of the 15 spiked samples and 23 market samples were classified through unsupervised recognition technique Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and the supervised technique Partial Least Square Discriminate Analysis (PLS-DA). Further the adulteration levels in the spiked samples were predicted through Partial Least Square Regression (PLSR) model. PCA could successfully classify Sudan dye and Metanil Yellow spiked samples at concentrations more than 5%, and overlapping groups were observed with starch and control samples. PLS-DA model showed good class separation of all adulterants in the fingerprinting region with 98.7% and 97.76% correct classification in calibration and validation sets respectively. The coefficient of determination (R2) and root-mean square error (RMSE) of PLSR models were found to be in the range of 0.94-0.98 and 0.67%-2.3%. The results suggest that FTIR spectroscopy along with chemometrics could be successfully used for the non-destructive and rapid detection of adulterants from turmeric powder.

Management of food waste is one of the most challenging environmental, economic and social problems in Canada due to the huge quantities of food waste which are generated per year. In Ontario alone, a staggering amount of 3.7 million tonnes/year of food and organic waste is generated and about 60% of food waste ends up in landfills. This study demonstrates a high-yielding carboxylate production method which utilizes food waste as a substrate. Carboxylates are high-value building block chemicals for the synthesis of plastics and liquid biofuel precursors. In the present work, a bioprocess is designed for the conversion of food waste to carboxylates at psychrophilic temperature of 17 °C under batch fermentation anaerobic conditions. The developed process shows alleviation of carboxylate-based microbial inhibition and provides a sustained production to up to 12 days, thereby yielding a high carboxylate volumetric productivity of 0.36 gL-1d-1. Notably, the analysis of carboxylate composition by gas chromatography reveals the ability of this process to facilitate a stable production of medium-chain carboxylates, which have a higher market value than small-chain ones. These comprise about 70% of the total carboxylate product stream in this process design. Furthermore, the use of waste-derived nanoparticles to improve the process efficiency and carboxylate recovery from the bioreactor system is also demonstrated in the present work.