Kurtosis-based projection pursuit analysis to evaluate South American rapadura

Rapadura is an artisanal candy obtained from concentrated sugarcane juice. In this study, a differentiation between South American rapadura producers has been tried using a Kurtosis-based projection pursuit analysis (kPPA) concerning essential minerals, acrylamide, moisture contents, pH, and color. These parameters revealed significant inter- and intra-country differences. Based on the employed measurements, a multivariate exploration with kPPA extracted information from rapadura even though it is a very artisanal product and was effective in separating classes, especially Brazilian and Ecuadorian rapadura, where principal component analysis failed. Moreover, ellipse confidence regions showed significant differences between non-organic and organic rapadura from Colombia and Peru in granulated form. From a chemometric point of view, the application of kPPA can be used in cases when other metrics (as based on the variance) fail and can be useful in the exploratory analysis of complex multivariate chemical data.