CHEMOMETRICS IN FOOD AUTHENTICATION

According to ISO definition “an entity is authentic if it is what it claims tobe.” and “Authentication is a process that is used to confirm that a claimed characteristic of an entity is actually correct”. When applied to food context this is actually a very broad concept covering several aspects including both the characterization and recognition of the identifiable features of a product as well as its accountability, in other words the degree of trustiness consumers associate to it. In practice, to assess authenticity it has to be taken into consideration in an integrated manner the several characteristics deliberately produced (sophistication, adulteration, counterfeit, appearance, etc.) or not (purity, contamination, degradation, etc.), but also the subjective consumer's perception of the worth of the product and issues such as terroir, authenticity, origin, production practice, etc.In this framework, quality control and authentication assessment need to go further traditional chemical analysis, which focuses on single classes of constituents/properties, and adopting a fingerprinting approach, trough fast,non-destructive techniques. In this perspective, the role of chemometrics is becoming basilar to efficiently extract the relevant information and to derive authenticity models. Nowadays, chemometrics offers 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. In the present contribution, the focus will be on illustrating the chemometrics pipeline highlighting the main issues, critical points and the successfully strategies with application to geographical traceability and typicality assessment.