Development of a Green Methodology for the Determination of Artisanal Danbo Cheese Quality Parameters

Abstract

A simple and fast method for the simultaneous determination of chloride and lactic acid in artisanal Danbo cheese was developed and validated. The proposed methodology combined a sample treatment using only ultrapure water as an extracting agent and ion chromatography with suppressed conductivity for the detection of the analytes. One gram of sample exactly weighted is added to 40.0 mL of ultrapure water at 55 ºC. The suspension was stirred for 5 minutes and after centrifugation the supernatant obtained is ready to be used for the determination of both analytes. The performance of this method was evaluated by comparing the results obtained with those acquired after the analysis of the cheese samples using the AOAC reference methods using a t-student test of mean concentration values. At a 95% significance level, the means obtained by the different methods were comparable. Analytical precision expressed as relative standard deviation (RSD %) was less than 6. Artisanal cheese samples were analyzed (n=12) using the validated methodology, obtaining chloride levels between 0.6 and 1.1% w w-1 expressed in sodium chloride and levels of lactic acid between 1.1 and 2.1% w w-1. Additionally, a greenness analysis was presented, using three different metric tools, concluding that the developed method is significantly in better agreement with the principles of Green Analytical Chemistry than the official methods.