Chemometrics for Food Quality Control and Authentication

The concern of society about food nowadays extends to the several aspects linked to food consumption encompassing nutritional value, health, safety, and quality, as well as ethics, sustainability, tradition, communication, marketing, and so on. The increased information available to the consumers, the awareness of the impact of diet on healthiness, and the issues brought by globalization of the food market on one hand and the institution of the Common Market (European Union (EU) countries) and its regulations on the other hand have progressively changed the leading paradigms in food science and the essential topics for the food industry. Undoubtedly, ‘quality’ is a primary criterion to access the market. However, quality is a multifaceted concept including both aspects, the set of identifiable features of a product and accountability, trustiness linked to it. Thus, quality is usually an integrated measure of several characteristics deliberately produced (sophistication, adulteration, counterfeit, appearance, etc.) or not (purity, contamination, degradation, etc.) and also of the subjective consumer’s perception of the worth of the product (to which issues such as terroir, authenticity, origin, and production practice contribute). In this context, quality control and authentication require a step beyond traditional chemical analysis and characterization, which focuses mainly on single classes of constituents/properties, moving to fingerprinting, fast, nondestructive techniques. In this perspective, the role of chemometrics is of paramount importance to efficiently extract the relevant information and by providing tailored tools that allow exploratory data analysis, graphical representation, and validation of the models during all steps of data processing as well as efficient storage, retrieval, and sharing of information.