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 consumers for the food product.

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

The 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 (the 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 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.

This Special Issue, ‘Flavoromics for Product Quality and Authenticity of Foods and Beverages, Second Edition’, brings together original research articles and review articles related to all aspects involving the 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 of the chemical–mechanistic interpretation of reactions involving flavor-impacting compounds are most welcome.

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

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• differentiation of food products and processes using data related to flavors or fragrances
• processes and techniques impacting the flavor profile of foods and beverages
• volatile compounds with flavor-active impact
• non-volatile compounds with flavor-active impact
• screening and analytical methodologies (qualitative and/or quantitative)
• statistical methods used for data analysis or representation
• innovative data mining methods
• mechanistic understanding of the chemical evolution of flavor-active compounds
• sensory analysis related to flavors and fragrances
• VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and natural or synthetic flavoring, additives, or adulterants
• secondary plant and microbial metabolites contributing to flavor

• Flavoromics for the Quality and Authenticity of Foods and Beverages in Molecules (8 articles)