From Laboratory Exploration to Practice: Applications, Challenges, and Development Trends of Rapid Evaporative Ionization Mass Spectrometry Technology in Food Detection

The expansion of the food industry and the acceleration of global trade have underscored the importance of food authenticity identification (FAI) for ensuring food safety, maintaining market integrity, and protecting consumer interests. Rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS), as an emerging food analysis technology, has demonstrated significant potential in FAI due to its real-time, accurate, and in-situ characteristics. This review article provides a comprehensive overview of REIMS technology, encompassing its developmental trajectory, experimental setup, operational procedures, ion sources, and ionization mechanisms. Then, it delves into the application of REIMS in data processing, particularly highlighting the advantages of chemometrics analysis, multivariate statistical analysis, and machine learning algorithms in FAI. The review delves into various application cases of REIMS in the food sector, highlighting its effectiveness in identifying food materials, monitoring processing procedures, and rapidly detecting adulteration and fraud. Despite its promise, REIMS faces challenges such as enhancing sensitivity and accuracy and broadening its applicability to diverse ionization targets. In the future, with ongoing technological advancements and in-depth research, REIMS technology will play a more significant role in food safety supervision. In addition, integrating REIMS with other analytical techniques and standardizing FAI processes based on REIMS will be pivotal areas for future research and development. These endeavors will not only bolster the technology's capabilities but also contribute to the sustainable growth of the food industry by ensuring higher standards of food safety and authenticity.