Food Traceability Applications

The second part of the book—Chapters 9-12— presents some selected applications of chemometrics to different topics of interest in the field of food authentication and control. Chapter 9 deals with the application of chemometric methods to the analysis of hyperspectral images, that is, of those images where a complete spectrum is recorded at each of the pixels. After a description of the peculiar characteristics of images as data, a detailed discussion on the use of exploratory data analytical tools, calibration and classification methods is presented. The aim of Chapter 10 is to present an overview of the role of chemometrics in food traceability, starting from the characterisation of soils up to the classification and authentication of the final product. The discussion is accompanied by examples taken from the different ambits where chemometrics can be used for tracing and authenticating foodstuffs. Chapter 11 introduces NMR-based metabolomics as a potentially useful tool for food quality control. After a description of the bases of the metabolomics approach, examples of its application for authentication, identification of adulterations, control of the safety of use, and processing are presented and discussed. Finally, Chapter 12 introduces the concept of interval methods in chemometrics, both for data pretreatment and data analysis. The topics... 

In the first part of this chapter, a briefly description of European regulations Authenticity and Traceability The European Union Point of View) and trace-ability and authenticity markers Authenticity and Traceability A Scientific Point of View) is reported. The second part is split into two sections namely Food Traceability and Food Authenticity applications, where the main features and advantages of some chemometrics approaches are presented. 

This chapter deals with the potentialities of chemometrics tools in resolving some real problems related to food traceability and authenticity. Since each chemometrics technique is widely explained in the previous chapters of the present book, only the application aspects are discussed in the present treatise. Particular attention will be paid only to the use of some exploratory, classification, and discrimination techniques. Moreover, all instrumental details are outside the aim of this chapter and will not be presented here. 

As stated previously, traceability is fundamental to establishing and eliminating the root cause of nonconforming product and therefore it should be mandatory in view of the requirements for Corrective Action. Providing traceability can be an onerous task. Some applications require products to be traced back to the original ingot from which they were produced. In situations of safety or national security it is necessary to identify product in such a manner because if a product is used in a critical application and subsequently found defective, it may be necessary to track down all other products of the same batch and eliminate them before there is a disaster. It happens in product recall situations. It is also very important in the automobile and food industries in fact, any industry where human life may be at risk due to a defective product being in circulation. 

The purpose of this paper is to consider the other end of the spectrum, namely, to look at cases where traceability links are essential to the success of the application. From a societal point of view, some of the most pressing applications have to do with food safety, clinical laboratory results, and protecting the quality of the environment. Traceability of measurements to those of a national laboratory is of great importance to these latter applications. 

A very broad spectrum of applications is encompassed in the papers, ranging from the determination of element concentrations in water to biotechnology-created substance concentrations in food. This range is particularly broad in terms of the degree of difficulty of establishing traceability. The reports clearly show that whereas traceability in the former case has been largely implemented, its establishment in the latter case is still outside the available possibilities. 

This also implies that, in the opposite direction, the material or article can be traced from any point in the chain down to the retailing point. In other words, if traceability can be described as the possibility to trace back from finished goods shipments to raw material lots, this should not neglect that there is a need to trace forward from raw material lots to identify all finished goods shipped. In fact traceability was introduced primarily for ensuring that defective food contact materials are identified and withdrawn from the market, in particular as far as compliance with the applicable legislation is concerned. If a given raw material is found in violation of the law, or such as to impair safety of the finished product, traceability systems shall be such as to allow withdrawal of all other finished product in which the concerned raw material has been used. To achieve this objective both levels must function properly. 

Food safety is a major concern for both government and the public. This has been further emphasized by recent reports of both microbial and chemical contamination of food. Moreover, the consumers preferences have resulted in large increases in food imports which, in some cases, do not provide traceability in terms of production processes, or details of pesticide applications pre- and postharvest. Therefore, to secure food safety and provide information for consumers, national authorities have to supply all information concerning food quality and regulate the amoimt of pesticide residues that could remain without posing any risk to consumers. 

EN systems were designed (in principle) to be used in a broad range of fields however, food analysis has been, and still seems to be, one of the most promising applications of EN because of its simplicity of use, low cost, rapidity and good correlation with sensory panels [9, 10]. ENs have been applied in various food contexts, such as process monitoring, freshness evaluation, shelf-life investigation, authenticity determination, product traceability [11-17]. In fact, aroma is one of the key parameters of food and the characteristic bouquet of volatile organic compounds, the... 

In all these applications, isotope ratio data are produced, which are interpreted on an absolute or relative basis and which have an impact on our daily life, whether this is in science (e.g., age of an artifact), in society (e.g., provenance of food), or in public safety (e.g., neutron shielding in nuclear power plants). To ensure that these data are reliable and accurate, some specific requirements have to be fulfilled. The main requirement is that all these measurement results are comparable, which means that the corresponding results can be compared and differences between the measurement results can be used to draw further conclusions. This is only possible if the measurement results are traceable to the same reference [25]. This in turn can only be realized by applying isotopic reference materials (IRMs) for correction for bias and for validation of the analytical procedure. Whereas in earlier days only experts in mass spectrometry were able to deliver reproducible isotope ratio data, nowadays many laboratories, some of which may even have never been involved with mass spectrometry before, produce isotope ratio data using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Especially for such users, IRMs are indispensable to permit proper method validation and reliable results. The rapid development and the broad availability of ICP-MS instrumentation have also led to an expansion of the research area and new elements are under investigation for their isotopic variations. In this context, all users require IRMs to correct for instrumental mass discrimination or at least to allow isotope ratio data to be related to a commonly accepted basis. 

In 2002, Directive 2002/72/EEC [2] was issued. This involves amendments to the Framework directive 89/109/EEC to include traceability and includes active packaging systems, e.g., packaging which deliberately interacts with the packaged food, for example as permeable gas barriers used in packaged meat applications. 

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