Hazelnut is one of the most important items in high-quality food products from Piedmont, Italy. The 'Tonda Gentile delle Langhe' (TGL) variety is acknowledged all over the world as the best one, and it is particularly appreciated when used to provide flavor in chocolate products. Authentication and/or traceability studies must therefore be developed to safeguard this variety against fraud, which can occur when the product is partially or totally substituted with hazelnuts of lower quality. In this work, a classification of hazelnuts from different countries is presented, showing the possibility to discriminate the TGL from other productions on the basis of the distribution of trace elements as determined by means of inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), with particular reference to lanthanides. Accuracy of the sample treatment procedure was tested by analysis of biological certified materials. Data from elemental analysis were chemometrically treated with an unsupervised method, such as principal component analysis (PCA), allowing for a good discrimination among groups.

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The traceability and authentication of milk were studied using trace and ultratrace elements as chemical markers. Among these variables, the group of lanthanides resulted in being particularly useful for this purpose as a result of their homogeneous distribution inside milk, which showed on the contrary to be intrinsically inhomogeneous from the elemental point of view. Using in this pilot study milk samples from a factory in Piedmont (Italy), we demonstrated that the distribution of lanthanides can be used as a fingerprint to put into relation the soil of the pasture land on which cows graze and the bottled milk produced in the factory. In fact, the distribution is maintained nearly unaltered along the production chain of milk, apart from the passage into the stomachs of the cows. Using the same variables, it was possible to discriminate between milk produced in the factory and milk samples taken from the large-scale retail trade.