Food Fraud Detection: The Role of Spectroscopy Coupled with Chemometrics

Abstract

Food fraud is a concern for both consumers and business operators, but can simply be controlled by food industries ensuring compliance with food laws as a moral duty for authentic food quality and safety. Intentional tampering with food content at any stage of production, processing and trade, may have far reaching implication as it may constitute a risk to human, animal, plant and environmental health. Therefore, there is need for quality of a foods to be genuine and undisputed in its nature, origin, identity, and claims, and meet expected properties (i.e., authentic). Ensuring food authenticity necessitates efficient and effective tracing and tracking of food products, particularly those with low production levels visà-vis demand, coupled with high nutritional, medicinal and or economic values. Detection of food fraud remains complex when considering the complex nature of foods. Besides discussing food fraud and related terminologies, this paper focuses on the combined spectroscopy and chemometrics approach for assessment of food authenticity Understanding of the nature of fraud, gathering the appropriate datasets, establishing global partnerships (where need be), predicting vulnerability, while employing food management systems, may facilitate management and or prevention of food fraud. Viewing the complex nature of food, and then with intentional tampering with its nature, detecting fraud associated with any given food and or food product remains complex. Spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics, although sophisticated, have revealed a good fit for the job, and hand held tools such as Scio (consumer physics, which is used to scan foods in the IR range) have been made to surpass the challenge.