Beer Fingerprinting and Multivariate Data Analysis Towards Informed Tailored Food Consumption

There is increasing awareness of consumer and society in general towards all aspects, which concern food consumption encompassing ethics, sustainability, health, safety, quality, tradition, communication, marketing, etc. Research in food chemistry area has mainly focused on chemical analysis and characterization to contribute to fundamental issues such as food safety and quality, nutritional and health requirements. Aim of this work is to go a step beyond that. Could our analytical chemistry expertise be of use and ease in the cultural and gastronomic aspect linked to food consumption? In particular, could we think of developing new tools to aid consumers when choosing foodstuff to have proper knowledge of it, and producers to meet consumer expectations while using food quality as drivers? To this aim our proposal is to use analytical spectroscopy to capture salient features of foodstuff (fingerprint) and build a reference database that can be efficiently searched through multivariate data analysis tools and linked to apps for mobile smart devices implemented for consumers inquires. At the same time consumer choice may be oriented by showing how products of similar categories cluster according to different criteria. As a first benchmark to develop these ideas we present a survey on beer. Beer is one of the most consumed alcoholic beverages with a highly relevant economic impact associated. However, our interest is mainly due to the fact that recently the consumers favor more and more artisanal product coming from local brewery and micro- brewery weighting much more the cultural and quality aspects linked to its consumption. This may be a very positive trend in order to prevent alcoholic disorders especially in young. Several beer samples differing by e.g. yeast, brewtype, brewery, etc, have been collected and NIR, NMR, GCMS fingerprinting together with sensory attribute and merceological parameters have been acquired. Multivariate explorative and clustering tools are employed to group beer according to several search criteria.