Determination of geographical origin of salts

International audienceCommon salt, i.e. table salt, commonly employed in cooking, is cheaper than specialty marine salt ob-tained by evaporation of seawater in solar salterns. For a decade some European producers intended to access Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) or Traditional Specialty Guaranteed (TSG) status in order to protect and value coarse salt, ground (fine) salt and salt flower, based on the quality policy for the products of European Union (EU) agriculture. The PGI associates a product with a region, to confirm its authentic origin whereas TSG highlights the traditional character, either in the composition or means of production. The first success in this field was obtained by marine salt producers of Guérande, France that received a PGI label on March 20, 2012. In Europe, consumers are, for example, attracted by high price salt products that could be used in gourmet cooking. Moreover, empirical observation highlighted a con-cept of revenue linked with territorial qualities, that is to say, combining intrinsic quality of the product and its anchoring in a specific place with its history and its knowledge-to make. This observation is world-wide known for all kind of food and the hand-collected products are usually linked, by producers, to an area of production, like olive oil or wine. Academic literature is very scarce about the characteristics of salt products used in food, even if some papers dealing with volatile compounds present in marine salts were published these last years. Using headspace - solid phase micro extraction (HS-SPME) combined with gas chromatography - mass spectrometry (GC-MS) Donadio, Bialecki, Valla, and Dufossé (2011) summarized 58 volatile compounds in brines and "fleurs de sel" collected in solar salterns from Saint-Armel (Brittany, France). Another technique could be used to associate a salt product with its region of production, i.e. the 16S rDNA fingerprinting of bacterial communities by Polymerase Chain Reaction-Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (Dufossé, Donadio, Valla, Meile and Montet, 2013). By using PCR-DGGE it is possible to estimate the microorganisms' diversity and to reveal the cultivable and non cultivable germs in a given ecosystem. Such a technique was successfully applied for traceability and origin determination of food products such as fish or fruits. The main objective of this work is to try linking volatile compounds or the PCR products with the geographical origin of the salts, with future application to salts produced around the Indian Ocean (Réunion island, Mauritius, Madagascar...). (Résumé d'auteur