A food additive, "Methyl Hesperidin" is a mixture of methylation products of hesperidin. In order to clarify the components of the commercial food additives, we isolated four main compounds and identified them as 3'-monomethylhesperidin, 3',5-dimethylhesperidin, 2', 3, 6'-trimethylhesperidin chalcone and 2', 3, 6'-trimethyl-4'-(rhamnosyl-2-O-methylglucosyl)-hesperetin chalcone, by spectroscopic analyses. It is revealed that the molecular extinction coefficients of these compounds are almost the same at UV297nm. Therefore, we propose the quantitative method by utilizing UV absorption at 297nm for the specification of the food additive.
