In the last twenty years, the consumption of diet and light foods has grown steadily, leading to the constant development of such products. Much emphasis has been placed on products that replace sucrose with sweeteners of low or zero calorie content. The development of new commercial sweeteners illustrates this tendency. In this work, principal component analysis and infrared spectroscopy were used to successfully differentiate the vehicles (mediums) employed in the production of sweeteners. This chemometric methodology reduced the dimensional space to two factors, accounting for 82% of the total variance of the data. The variables responsible for this discrimination were localized in the fingerprint region of the infrared spectrum (752.2 to 1284.5 cm-1). The exploratory analysis proved effective for visualizing these data, generating semi-quantitative information for the sweeteners composed of lactose/aspartame, which would have been impossible to obtain without the use of the chemometric tool.
sweeteners; chemometrics; PCA; FTIR
