Determination of Free Fatty Acids in Nuts and Nut Products
Thorsten Tybussek, Klaus Rieblinger, 
Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV 
Freising, Germany

Free fatty acids are a common parameter for the quality of fats and oils. But also the quality of nuts and nut products correlates with the amount of free fatty acids. A high content of free fatty acids can indicate premature, moldy or wrong stored nuts. This fact makes free fatty acids an ideal parameter for the quality of nuts and nut products.
The most common method for the determination of free fatty acids in nuts is the determination of the acid value by titration of the extracted fat fraction. Nevertheless this method isn’t either precise nor expeditiously.
For optimization a precise and sensitive method by gaschromatograpy for the determination free fatty acids in nuts and nut products was developed. By performing the extraction and separation of the free fatty acids from the sample in one single step the developed method has a low operating effort. Compared to the traditional methods this new method has the same time exposure but comes with a higher precision and sensitivity.