  Many studies have shown that the geographic origin is one of the most
influencing factors in the choice of olive oil. To avoid misleading, European
regulation has established specific rules to report the geographical origin of
extra virgin and virgin olive oils on the product label, but an official
analytical procedure to verify this information has not been yet defined. In
this work, a flash gas chromatography untargeted approach for determination of
volatile compounds, followed by a chemometric data elaboration, is proposed for
discrimination of EVOOs and VOOs according to their geographical origin (EU and
Extra-EU). A set of 210 samples was analyzed and two different classification
techniques were used, one linear and one non-linear. The two models were also
validated using an external data set. Satisfactory results were obtained for
both chemometric approaches: considering the PLS-DA, 89% and 81% of EU and
Extra-EU samples, respectively, were correctly classified; for ANN the
percentages were 93% and 89%, respectively. These results confirm the
reliability of the method as a rapid approach to discriminate EVOOs and VOOs
according to their geographical provenance.
