Driven by economic incentives to reduce production costs and increase profits, some producers tend to adulterate food, thereby endangering consumers’ health.

Against this backdrop, the aim of a recent study conducted by a team of Iranian researchers (Sadriyan et al., 2025) was to investigate the adulteration of tomato concentrate using an electronic nose (E-nose) equipped with 10 gas sensors to detect the presence of sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate at concentrations of 0%, 0.05% and 0.1%. During the experiment, the effects of these compounds on the product’s physicochemical properties, including pH, total soluble solids (TSS), precipitate-to-product weight ratio (PPT) and total acidity (TA), were also assessed.

The results show that linear discriminant analysis (LDA) achieves 100% accuracy in detecting the levels of the two adulterants, while principal component analysis (PCA) and support vector machine (C-SVM) are able to effectively identify samples with 0.05% and 0.1% content.