An industry perspective of food fraud

The mistrust in country of origin information and reliability of food products is currently increasing dramatically. Food fraud will be one of the challenging new questions we will have to deal with in the following decade. Therefore, it is the aim of the present article to summarize principles about counterfeited food products including a description upon reasons for motivation for falsification including mislabelling. From these points of view it becomes obvious that there is a high demand for the introduction of non-invasive analytical instruments that could be used easily by consumers, regulators and food administrators to check with one measurement origin and quality of a product. In this context miniaturized infrared spectroscopic devices give great promise to fulfil these aims for some kind of self-authentication. Therefore, some milestone techniques and applications developed so far are highlighted and the future role of this entire methodology is critically evaluated.