Future Food Analysis and Detection

Dear Colleagues,

“Man is What He Eats”: Food represents one of the fundamental needs for human beings, and therefore, food analysis is a field of utmost importance. At the same time, given its inherent complexity, this subject encompasses multiple aspects, e.g., safety of use, health requirements, compliance to laws, organoleptic characteristics, and consumer’s acceptance, often intertwined. For instance, a study could aim at developing an analytical platform for the protection of consumers, or rather be more centered on deeply understanding the characteristics of specific foodstuffs and the effects after their consumption.

In this context, spectroscopy is a suitable tool for food analysis, as it is versatile (different spectral regions provide different and often complementary information on the same set of samples), it is relatively rapid and, in general, cheap if compared to other instrumental techniques, it is almost always nondestructive or, at least, microdestructive, and in many cases, it can even be non-invasive and require minimum sample manipulation or pretreatment, thus representing a green alternative to other state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, if coupled with imaging/microscopic techniques, it can provide information not only about the average quantity/concentration but also about the distribution of constituents within the matrix.

Based on these considerations, this Topic aims at collecting studies describing interesting/relevant problems in food analysis and, ideally, suggesting strategies for solving/handling them. The submitted papers can encompass different aspects and scopes: authenticating and/or characterizing aliments, detecting frauds, and ensuring law/sanitary compliance. Additionally, since chemometrics plays a fundamental role in the application of spectroscopic techniques to food-related issues, papers dealing with new data processing approaches suitable for overcoming specific issues in the spectroscopic analysis of food samples are also more than welcome.

Prof. Dr. Federico Marini
Dr. Alessandra Biancolillo
Topic Editors