Current trends and recent advances on food authenticity technologies and chemometric approaches

Background: Food frauds and counterfeit products produced to obtain economic advantages have become a growing concern over the last decade. The assessment of food safety and authenticity constitute a powerful tool to mitigate this problem and protect public health. Nevertheless, the growing sophistication of fraudulent practices requires a continuous update and improvement of the analytical methodologies. Scope and approach: In this context, the advances and novel techniques and chemometric approaches reported since 2016 are discussed regarding their potential use in food authentication. This review details the main analytical techniques applied in the extraction, detection and identification of metabolites to obtain food fingerprints, emphasizing the advantages and drawbacks of each approach with practical examples. Additionally, the current legislation on food authentication has also been revised. Key findings and conclusions: GC-MS, LC- q-TOFMS and NMR followed by PCA and PIS-DA are the most often reported analytical methodologies to discriminate between authentic and non-authentic foodstuffs using chemical fingerprints. More recently, novel and promising statistical methods with high classification power (DD-SIMCA, OO-SIMCA, BPR, k-NN, among others) are being already applied. Overall, the development of non-destructive, on-site and real-time analytical procedures able to deliver fast and unambiguous food authentication results will continue to be the goal driving food research.