Differentiation of Apricots of Different Geographic Origin in Central and Southern Europe by Applying

Consumers prefer food commodities of certain origins over the same products of other provenances and are willing to pay higher prices for them. Thus, it is possible to increase profit simply by giving an incorrect geographic origin to a product. To effectively control the declared geographic origin of food, the product itself has to be investigated to discover whether it actually originates from the declared origin, or if it has been mislabeled. Conventionally, control of a geographic origin is conducted by stable isotope analysis of the main elements, which has proven to be successful in numerous cases, but often reference data have to be produced anew for every harvest to control, resulting in additional costs and delays. Applying entirely geogenic parameters for the control of provenance requires reference data to be produced only once. As they do not vary between years and harvests, they can often be used for different (food) commodities. Here, we investigate whether the geographic origin of apricot samples can be controlled by their