The issues related to food science and
authentication are of particular importance for
researchers, consumers and regulatory entities. The need
to guarantee quality foodstuff - where the word
"quality" encompasses many different meanings, including
e.g. nutritional value, safety of use, absence of
alteration and adulterations, genuineness, typicalness,
etc. - has led researchers to look for increasingly
effective tools to investigate and deal with food
chemistry problems. As even the simplest food is a
complex matrix, the way to investigate its chemistry
cannot be other than multivariate. Therefore,
chemometrics is a necessary and powerful tool for the
field of food analysis and control. For food science in
general and food analysis and control in particular,
there are several problems for which chemometrics are of
utmost importance. Traceability, i.e. the possibility of
verifying the animal/botanical, geographical and/or
productive origin of a foodstuff, is, for instance, one
area where the use of chemometric techniques is not only
recommended but essential: indeed, at present no
specific chemical and/or physico-chemical markers have
been identified that can be univocally linked to the
origin of a foodstuff and the only way of obtaining
reliable traceability is by means of multivariate
classification applied to experimental fingerprinting
results. Another area where chemometrics is of
particular importance is in building the bridge between
consumer preferences, sensory attributes and molecular
profiling of food: by identifying latent structures
among the data tables, bilinear modeling techniques
(such as PCA, MCR, PLS and its various evolutions) can
provide an interpretable and reliable connection among
these domains. Other problems include process control
and monitoring, the possibility of using RGB or
hyperspectral imaging techniques to nondestructively
check food quality, calibration of multidimensional or
hyphenated instruments etc.
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