Quality and authenticity of foods

TAG are increasingly used in the food industry as a tool to assess the quality and authenticity of vegetable oils [118,119], particularly adulteration of olive oil with hazelnut oil [120,121]. 

PyMS is capable of generating useful data on intact foodstuffs or associated microorganisms (food poisoning bacteria, for example). PyMS is based on the controlled thermal degradation of samples under inert conditions to produce mixtures of volatile compounds that are swept into the mass spectrometer ion source and ionized by El or Cl. The resulting fingerprint spectrum of the analyte contains characteristic features that can be classified by chemometric methods. Pyrolysis is sometimes combined with GC-MS in order to extract more information from the analyte. Applications of PyMS in the food sciences include quality assurance and authentication of food and drinks, analysis of cell wall material in food plants, and identification of food microorganisms. 

To detect adulteration of wine. Bums et al. (2002) found that the ratios of acetylated to p-coumaroylated conjugates of nine characteristic anthocyanins served as useful parameters to determine grape cultivars for a type of wine. Our laboratory utilized mid-infrared spectroscopy combined with multivariate analysis to provide spectral signature profiles that allowed the chemically based classification of antho-cyanin-containing fruits juices and produced distinctive and reproducible chemical fingerprints, making it possible to discriminate different juices. " This new application of ATR-FTIR to detect adulteration in anthocyanin-containing juices and foods may be an effective and efficient method for manufacturers to assure product quality and authenticity. 

Singhal, R., Kulkarni, P., and Rege, D. (1997). Honey, quality criteria. In "Handbook of Indices of Food Quality and Authenticity", (R. S. Singhal, Ed.), pp. 358-385. Woodhead Publishing Ltd., Cambridge, England. 

A. J. Charlton, W. H. Farrington, P. Brereton 2002, (Application of 1H NMR and multivariate statistics for screening complex mixtures quality control and authenticity of instant coffee), J. Agric. Food Chem. 50, 3098-3103. 

Food authentication is one of the major areas involved in food quality and safety. Several regulations have been implemented to assure correct information and to avoid species substitutions (26). Food species identification has traditionally relied on morphological/anatomical analysis. However, this is a difficult task in the case of closely related species and especially for those products that have been subjected to processing practices. Therefore, there is a strong need for fast and reliable molecular identification methods that provide authorities and food industries the tools needed to comply with labeling and traceability requirements, thus ensuring product quality and protection of the consumer. 

Woodcock, T., Fagan, C.C., O Donnell, C.P., Downey, G. Application of near and mid-infrared spectroscopy to determine cheese quality and authenticity. Food Biopocess. Technol. 1, 117-129 (2008)... 

One of the most important tasks of modem analytical chemistry is the analysis of foods, including fundamental aspects as food safety, quality, and authenticity. In the last decade, and especially in the last years, CE has also gained popularity in food analysis as an alternative to GC or HPLC because of the inherent characteristics/advantages of the technique in terms of analysis speed, efficiency, and low sample and reagent consumption (50-54). Table 6.3 shows... 

The increasing need for analytical methods to establish food authenticity has led to the development of a number of approaches, many of which involve the use of NMR spectroscopy. Some texts have reviewed the generally accepted methods for quality and authenticity control.15-167-172... 

Singhal, R.S., Kulkami, P.R., and Rege, D.V. Handbook of Indices of Food Quality and Authenticity. Woodhead Publishmg Limited, Cambridge, U.K., p. 345.1997. 

Handbook of indices of food quality and authenticity R. S. Singhal, P. K. Kulkami and D. V. Rege... 

The importance of amino acids, peptides, and proteins is widely know and it arises from different aspects ranging from an important role in human nutrition and health to different technological functions that can widely influence the quality of food products (mainly for peptides and proteins). Therefore, their analysis is crucial not only from the nutritional point of view (for example, to warranty and verify the content of an specific amino acids) but also for product quality assessment and product development (where information about the composition of the protein fraction is mandatory). Also important is assessment of the authenticity of foods through enantiomer separation and identification. 

Until recently, this approach has focused mainly on the stndy of human diseases, pharmaceuticals, plant metabolism analysis, and toxicology. However, nowadays it is being extended to food science for food component analysis, food quality and authenticity, and food consumption monitoring in order to improve consumer health and confidence. Because metabolomics allows the simultaneous characterization of large numbers of molecules, this approach has been recently introduced by food and nutrition scientists to obtain a comprehensive fingerprint of food and nutrition. In this context, Cifuentes [2] introduced the term foodomics as a discipline that stndies food and nutrition domains through the application of advanced omics technologies. 

UHPLC has been used recently in food metabolomics. Table 3.1 summarizes reeent publications of UHPLC separation mode applied in this field. Examples of different applications such as food quality and authenticity and food component... 

Fliigel, R., Carle, R., Schieber, A. Quality and authenticity control of fruit purees, fruit preparations and jams - a review. Trends Food Sci. Technol. 16, 433 (2005)... 

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... 

Food authentication verifies how much a food is in accordance with its label description and law [3] and it could be considered a further guarantee for the quality and safety of a foodstuff. In European Union (EU), the production and the commercialisation of food are rightly protected and regulated by several rules [4-9] always according to quality and healthy criteria, as it is better explained in the following sessions. 

In the last decades, the interest of different researchers towards the use of analytical methodologies supporting the authenticity and traceability of food is ever-increasing. In particular, chemometrics tools combined with different analytical techniques are widely used to verify the authenticity of food. In the past two decades, a large number of contributions including numerous review articles and books dealing with quality and authenticity control have been published [11-26]. 

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