Spectroscopic fingerprinting techniques for food characterisation

Abstract

<p>The analysis of samples by using spectroscopic fingerprinting techniques is more and more common and widespread. Such approaches are very convenient, since they are usually fast, cheap and non-destructive. In many applications no sample pretreatment is required, the acquisition of the spectrum can be performed in about one minute and no solvents are required. As a consequence, the return on investment of the related technology is very high.<br />The "disadvantage" of these techniques is that, being the signal non-selective, simple mathematical approaches (e.g., Lambert-Beer law) cannot be applied. Instead, a multivariate treatment must be performed by using chemometrics tools.<br />In what concerns food analysis, they can be applied in several steps, from the evaluation of the quality and the conformity of raw material to the assessment of the quality of the final product, to the monitoring of the shelf life of the product itself. Another interesting field of application is the verification of food-authenticity claims, this being extremely important in the case of foods labeled as protected designation of origin (PDO), protected geographical indication (PGI) and traditional speciality guaranteed (TSG).<br />In the present paper, it is described how non-selective signals can be used for obtaining useful information about a food.</p>

The feasibility of applying NIR and FT-IR fingerprinting to detect adulteration in black pepper

“…In relation to the globally traded amount of pepper an adequate number of controls by several traditional analytical methods is not realistic. In contrast, spectroscopic fingerprinting techniques have been shown to be low cost, rapid and comprehensive characterisation tools (Casale, Bagnasco, Casolino, Lanteri, & Leardi, 2016). Along with chemometrics a resolution of unique chemical information is provided, which allows rapid monitoring of subtle compositional changes (Rodriguez-Saona, Giusti, & Shotts, 2016).…”

VinegarScan: A Computer Tool Based on Ultraviolet Spectroscopy for a Rapid Authentication of Wine Vinegars

“…Thus, the spectral position of an absorption band in this region is indicative of the presence or absence of certain structural features or functional groups. However, the identification and quantification of compounds is possible in a pure component system, but in foods, UV-vis spectra generally show only a few broad absorbance bands that are often rather broad and difficult to associate to single chromophores [6]. For this reason, this technique has mainly been applied to non-targeted food analysis [4].…”

“…Thus, the results obtained by the use of the whole UV-vis spectra as a fingerprint, that is for example by the development of classification models and even by the direct observation of the spectra, could avoid the use of quantitative methods that need to know the specific compounds related to the characteristic to be determined, which would require trained operators as well as the use of standards and time-consuming analyses. Its application has been very interesting in the field of the verification of food-authenticity claims, this being extremely important for example in the case of foods labeled as protected designation of origin (PDO) as is the case of some vinegars [6].…”