Overview
Issues related to food science and authentication are particularly important to researchers, consumers, and regulators. The need to guarantee quality foodstuff-where "quality" encompasses many different meanings, including nutritional value, safety of use, and absence of alteration and adulterations-has led researchers to look for more effective tools to investigate and deal with food chemistry problems. Even the simplest food is a complex matrix, thus, investigating its chemistry must be multivariate. Chemometrics is a necessary and powerful tool in food analysis and control. For food science in general and food analysis and control in particular, there are several problems for which chemometrics are of utmost importance. Traceability, i.e. the possibility of verifying the animal/botanical, geographical and/or productive origin of a foodstuff, is, for instance, one area where the use of chemometric techniques is not only recommended but essential: indeed, at present no specific chemical and/or physicochemical markers have been identified that can be univocally linked to the origin of a foodstuff and the only way of obtaining reliable traceability is by means of multivariate classification applied to experimental fingerprinting results. Another area where chemometrics is of particular importance is in building the bridge between consumer preferences, sensory attributes and molecular profiling of food: by identifying latent structures among the data tables, bilinear modeling techniques (such as PCA, MCR, PLS and its various evolutions) can provide an interpretable and reliable connection among these domains. Other problems include process control and monitoring, the possibility of using RGB or hyperspectral imaging techniques to nondestructively check food quality, calibration of multidimensional or hyphenated instruments etc.
