Recent Trends and Advances in Food Authentication and Traceability, 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Food authentication, including the detection of food fraud/adulteration and food traceability, has been rapidly growing over the past two decades due to increasing public awareness regarding food quality and safety, nutrition, and health. Concerned parties include consumers, producers, and legislators.

Food authentication is the analytical process used to verify that a food product is in compliance with its label description. Food fraud involves the deliberate and intentional substitution, addition, tampering, or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients, or packaging, as well as false or misleading statements made about a product for economic gain. Food traceability, in turn, is the analytical process used to quickly and accurately trace a product from ‘farm to fork’, either forwards or backwards.

Numerous factors can directly influence the chemical composition of foods and consequently affect their organoleptic and nutritional properties, including the variety or breed, geographical origin, conditions of cultivation, pedoclimatic conditions, breeding and/or feeding, etc. Thus, the development of rapid, accurate, sensitive, and reproducible analytical methods to guarantee the authenticity and traceability of foods is of primary interest to scientists and technologists.

The aim of the present Topic, entitled ‘Recent Trends and Advances in Food Authentication and Traceability’, is to bring together the most recent work of scientists and technologists on food authentication, detection of food adulteration, and food traceability. More specifically, the present Topic will cover spectroscopic methods (NIR, FTIR, UV and Fluorescence Spectroscopy, NMR, SNIF-NMR,  IRMS, etc.); chromatographic methods (GC, GC/MS, HPLC, HPLC/MS, HPLC-IRMS, etc.); elemental analysis methods (ICP, ICP-OES,ICP-MS); advanced DNA-based detection methods for identifying genetically modified food and plant/animal species in foods; advanced PCR techniques for identifying specific food components; enzymatic techniques for authenticating food components; enzyme immunoassays for identifying animal species in foods; chemometrics in food analysis; proteomics, metabolomics, and non-targeted fingerprinting approaches in food analysis; traceability across the supply and processing chain of foods; development and implementation of effective traceability and product recall systems, development of methods for identifying food adulteration; legislation related to traceability; analytical techniques for food traceability, such as molecular methods (e.g. DGGE, SSCP) and next-generation sequencing (NGS). Articles addressing the latest trends in any of the above areas of interest are welcome.

Prof. Dr. Anastasia Badeka
Prof. Dr. Michael Kontominas
Topic Editors