Both plant breeding programs and food industry need to develop rapid and low cost methods to characterize sunflower prior to allotment. Near infrared spectrometry (NIRS) is widely used to classify sunflower lots according to fatty acid content. This study proposes an extension of NIRS potential use con cerning sunflower by tocopherol and phytosterol content quantifications. Approximately 800 samples of ground sunflower kernels were scanned by NIRS at 2 nm intervals from 400 to 2500 nm. For each sample standard meas urements of tocopherol and phytosterol contents were performed. Total tocopherol content was obtained by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with a fluorescence detector while total phytosterol content was assessed by gas chromatography (GC). For tocopherol, the calibration data set ranged from 190 to 1280 mg mg kg-1 oil (mean value around 615±165 kg-1 oil) whereas for phytosterol content, the calibration data set ranged from 125 to 765 mg 100 g-1 oil (mean value of 334_75 mg 100 g-1 oil). The NIRS calibration showed a relative good correlation (R2=0.62) between pre dicted by NIRS and real values for total tocopherol content but a poor correlation for total phytosterol content (R2=0.21). These results indicate that NIR spectrometry could be useful to classify high and low tocopherol containing lots despite possible improvement of calibration by inclusion of a larger number of data in tocopherols NIRS calibration. In contrast, the determination of phytosterol content by NIRS needs more investigations. In this study, only one mathematical calibration was tested and other mathematical methods are under investigations.