5 - Advances in Fluorescence Emission Spectroscopy for Food Authenticity Testing

Abstract

Food authenticity is a very important issue for consumers, producers, and distributors. Accurate labeling is important to help consumers select appropriate types of product to fulfill their demands and to avoid some ingredients in the case of people who do not consume specific products in their diet owing to health, religious, or ethical reasons. Authentication methods applied to food can be classified according to different criteria. Separation techniques, such as gas chromatography, focus on the existence or absence of certain chemical compounds in the adulterated sample. Physical techniques are based on a combination of measurements, eg, light absorbance at different frequencies or over the whole spectrum. Fluorescence is one of the physical techniques that have been investigated for food authentication. The potential of fluorescence spectroscopy for monitoring food products has increased over the past few years with the widespread application of chemometric tools together with technical and optical developments in equipment. Fluorescence spectroscopy is a rapid, sensitive, and nondestructive analytical technique that can be used to record fingerprints of food products. The potential of fluorescence techniques (conventional excitation-emission matrix and synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy) for food authenticity testing is unquestionable, especially when it is combined with powerful multivariate analysis tools such as principal component analysis, parallel factor analysis, and factorial discriminant analysis.