Current trends and recent advances on food authenticity technologies and chemometric approaches

Food frauds and counterfeit products produced to obtain economic advantages have become a growing concern over the last decade. The assessment of food safety and authenticity constitute a powerful tool to mitigate this problem and protect public health. Nevertheless, the growing sophistication of fraudulent practices requires a continuous update and improvement of the analytical methodologies. In this context, the advances and novel techniques and chemometric approaches reported since 2016 are discussed regarding their potential use in food authentication. This review details the main analytical techniques applied in the extraction, detection and identification of metabolites to obtain food fingerprints, emphasizing the advantages and drawbacks of each approach with practical examples. Additionally, the current legislation on food authentication has also been revised. GC-MS, LC- q-TOF-MS and NMR followed by PCA and PLS-DA are the most often reported analytical methodologies to discriminate between authentic and non-authentic foodstuffs using chemical fingerprints. More recently, novel and promising statistical methods with high classification power (DD-SIMCA, OO-SIMCA, BPR, k-NN, among others) are being already applied. Overall, the development of non-destructive, on-site and real-time analytical procedures able to deliver fast and unambiguous food authentication results will continue to be the goal driving food research. [Display omitted] •Current regulatory framework and databases in food authenticity field are described.•Advances in extraction methods for food authentication purpose are highlighted.•The most frequently used analytical techniques in food authentication were discussed.•Chemometric approaches for food authentication purpose have been reviewed.•Advantages and drawbacks of technological approaches for this issue are presented.