Flavoromics for the Quality and Authenticity of Foods and Beverages

Dear Colleagues,

Food products, beverages, and ingredients should meet requirements ensuring their quality and authenticity. Food quality is a multidimensional and multidisciplinary concept, historically related to the absence of defects. More recently, the definition of food quality has included nutritional, organoleptic, and ethical aspects.

Food authenticity is the matching of the claims being made for a food product to its real characteristics and to the reasonable expectations of the consumer for the food product.

The severity of the quality requirements is related to the type of product: from mass-produced food products, up to the premium-quality products or products with geographical mention or other specific quality mentions such as ‘organic’, ‘vegetarian’, ‘vegan’, and others.

Methodologies used to investigate the quality and authenticity of foods, beverages, and their ingredients are often based on the determination of flavor-active compounds, such as hexanal for lipid oxidation, alpha-acids for the bitter taste of beers, oligosaccharides for honeys, anisoles for wines, biogenic amines for meat and fish products, and a sensory profile for virgin olive oil, to cite only a few examples.

However, these protocols do not exhaustively describe the overall quality of a process or product, and therefore innovative methodologies and approaches are being introduced, underpinned by advancements in measurement science.

Flavoromics could be one option for an integrated approach to food quality assessment. Flavoromics is an approach combining flavor fingerprinting (untargeted profiling of non-volatile or volatile compounds, or targeted flavor-impacting metabolite profiling) with chemometrics to study the quality of a product and the authenticity of the claims presented for a specific quality product. Flavoromics brings closer the chemical profiling of flavor-impacting compounds with the sensory science. Prompted by the evolution of modern high-resolution analytical techniques and new capabilities in dealing with large datasets, this approach deals with the large amount of data involved in fingerprinting/profiling methodologies, with advanced procedures of data treatment, chemometrics, multivariate statistics, and advanced data mining techniques.

The Special Issue ‘Flavoromics for Product Quality and Authenticity of Foods and Beverages’ brings together original research articles and review articles related to all the aspects involving methodologies used to determine the quality of the process used to produce foods, beverages, and ingredients, in which the flavoromics approach has been used in the widest sense. In this respect, hypotheses on the chemical mechanistic interpretation of the reactions involving flavor-impacting compounds are most welcome.

Prof. Dr. Emanuele Boselli
Prof. Dr. Fulvio Mattivi
Dr. Edoardo Longo
Guest Editors

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