Volatilomic with chemometrics: a toward authentication approach for food authenticity control

Volatilomics as a tool to ascertain food adulteration, authenticity, and origin

“…As a part of food fraud, food adulteration is the dishonest, fraudulent, or deceptive act of intentionally adding inferior, lower quality, or even harmful substances to foodstuffs or removing from them valuable ingredients, deceiving consumers about their quality, safety, or authenticity (Noshad et al., 2023). The practice of adulteration is connected to the economic gain of the traders, who increase their profit, while deliberately decreasing the quality of the products with dishonest practices.…”

“…A broad range of different technologies is applied to identify and quantify VOCs, with volatilomics technology gaining great attention because of the fast, noninvasive, and inexpensive methods used, which provide scientifically sound results. Over the past few years, volatilomics technology has emerged as an exceptional tool for analyzing the quality and authenticity of foods and detecting possible adulteration practices (Noshad et al., 2023).…”

“…Principal component analysis (PCA), discriminant analysis (DA), hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), and partial least squares DA (PLS‐DA) are some of the statistical approaches commonly employed to process and analyze the obtained datasets. Depending on the purpose, these methods aim to either reduce the number of variables, generate an overview of the volatilome, reveal differences or similarities between samples, identify patterns, or understand/predict relationships within the data (Lytou et al., 2019; Noshad et al., 2023). However, all of them require careful application and interpretation and may not be suitable for all types of datasets.…”