Impact of Processing and Extraction on the Minor Components of Green Spanish-Style Gordal Table Olive Fat, as Assessed by Innovative Approaches

This work aims to study the effect of the green Spanish-style table olive processing and extraction method of fat on its minor components. For this purpose, it uses standard multivariate analysis (developed for Euclidean space), Compositional Data (CoDa) analysis (for data in the simplex) and Multiple Factor analysis (MFA). Overall, processing had a scarce effect on most of the minor components except ethyl and methyl esters and diacylglycerols, which markedly increased during fermentation; however, these compounds in table olive do not have the negative connotations that those in olive oil do since they are normal metabolites from the yeast microflora habitually present during the process. The work also showed that the quantification of minor components in table olive fat was an extraction-dependent method since Soxhlet increased the concentrations of fatty alcohols, triterpene dialcohols, sterols, waxes and polar compounds. Regarding statistical methods, CoDa analysis strategies were successfully applied to produce more appropriate clustering and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) segregation than standard tools. Moreover, MFA allowed for study of the components individually and by groups; the relationships among groups led to the most appropriate clustering and PCA segregation of samples and revealed the effect of the chemical groups’ evolution on the similarity/dissimilarity between samples. Therefore, MFA was the statistical analysis that led to the most information on the effect of processing and extraction methods. Its combination with appropriate CoDa logratios could be an exciting challenge.