Exploratory study on aroma profile of cardamom by GC- MS and Electronic nose

Cardamom is known as “Queen of Spices”. It is one of the most highly priced spices in the world. The commercial part of the cardamom is the fruit (Capsule) of the plant that is used as a spice and a flavoring agent. The major quality measurement parameter of the cardamom is freshness, size, colour, aroma etc. Aroma is one of the main and crucial quality parameter for cardamom. The present practice of aroma quality estimation is done by GC, GC-MS, where different volatile oil and chemicals qualitative and quantitative tests are done. The present practice is laborious, time consuming and skilled manpower demanding process. In our present study an effort has been made to develop an Electronic Nose for rapid aroma determination of cardamom. Centres for Development of Advanced Computing, (C-DAC), Kolkata has indigenously developed the Electronic Nose (E-Nose) to estimate the quality of food and agro produces. Three-clone specific cardamom samples ware tested using this system as an exploratory study to determine the quality of cardamom and found the system is able to differentiate the samples. The principal component analysis shows distinct three clusters with principal component (PC1) 91.6% and PC2 6.8%. This paper demonstrates the quality estimation of cardamom by E-Nose.