Raman Spectroscopy

The development and implementation of robust, rapid, cost‐effective, and environmentally friendly analytical methods is nowadays constant manifested among the research laboratories. All these requirements are totally fulfilled by Raman spectroscopy, which has as a main advantage that the measurement is generally performed through the direct analysis of the samples and thus being considered an environmentally friendly technique. Raman spectroscopy started to gain, during the last years, a particular interest among the research groups and control laboratories acting in the food and beverages science field. This, because of its potential either for the identification or quantification of some compounds or for the differentiation of some food or beverages classes, according to some predefined criteria, as function of the investigated matrix, i.e. geographical or botanical origin, vintage, etc. It was demonstrated that the association between Raman spectroscopy and some of the advanced processing data tools (supervised statistical methods, artificial intelligence, or machine learning algorithms) are enhancing the samples differentiation. In this chapter, some of the main applications of Raman spectroscopy in food and beverages studies reported in the literature for selected matrices (honey, edible oils, wine, and fruit spirits) are presented. In addition, the advantages of this technique, especially in the differentiation of high water content food matrices, are discussed.