Synthetic azo dyes, such as tartrazine, sunset yellow and allura red have sensitive polarographic waves in solution (pH 9.2). However, the dyes polarographic waves are seriously overlapped making their simultaneous determination difficult without previous sample preparation. The aim of this work was to apply partial least squares (PLS) multivariate calibration to such commonplace electrochemical technique as differential pulse polarography (DPP) for the simultaneous determination of the dye's three component mixture at trace levels (0.05–1.00 μmol/L). The method has been applied in the determination of these synthetic dyes in commercial food products.

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