Recent Trends and Advances in Food Authentication and Traceability

Dear Colleagues,

Food authentication, including the detection of food fraud/adulteration as well as food traceability, has been a rapidly growing field 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 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; or false or misleading statements made about a product for economic gain. Food traceability, in turn, is the analytical process to quickly and accurately trace product from ‘farm to fork’ forwards or backwards.

Numerous factors can directly influence the chemical composition of foods affecting, in turn, 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 the identification of genetically modified food, as well as identification of plant and animal species in foods, advanced PCR techniques for the identification of specific food components, enzymatic techniques for the authentication of food components, enzyme immunoassays for the identification of animal species in foods, chemometrics in food analysis, proteomics and 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 the identification of food adulteration, legislation related to traceability, analytical techniques for food traceability such as molecular methods (e.g. DGGE, SSCP), next-generation sequencing (NGS), etc. Articles related to the latest trends in all of the above areas of interest are welcome.

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