<p>Potassium sorbate may be illegally added to fresh coconut water in order to prolong its marketable life, but this adulteration may not be identified on the product label. The aim of this research was therefore to evaluate if samples of fresh coconut water that had been adulterated with measured amounts of potassium sorbate could be detected by near infrared hyperspectral imaging (NIR-HSI). Samples of coconut water with different potassium sorbate concentrations (<i>N</i> = 100) and pure coconut water samples (<i>N</i> = 100) were used in this study with their averaged spectral data used as independent variables. The smoothing spectral pretreatment gave the highest classification accuracy of 98.48% by partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). While support vector machine regression (SVMR) with spectral pretreatment, using the 1st derivative combined with multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), achieved the optimum condition for developing the calibration model for determining potassium sorbate concentration with the correlation coefficient of prediction (R_p) of 0.818 and the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 327.86 ppm. The results showed that NIR-HSI was able to be used as a fast, reliable, economic and environmentally friendly method of detecting potassium sorbate addition to coconut water.</p>