An overview on multi-elemental profile integrated with chemometrics for food quality assessment: toward new challenges

ZALDARRIAGA HEREDIA, JORGELINA; WAGNER, MARCELO; CORA JOFRE, FLORENCIA; SAVIO, MARIANELA; AZCARATE, SILVANA MARIELA; CAMIÑA, JOSÉ MANUEL

Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition

Taylor and Francis Ltd.

Año: 2023 vol. 63 p. 8173 - 8193

Food products, especially those with high value-added, are commonly subjected to strict qualitycontrols, which are of paramount importance, especially for attesting to some peculiar featuresrelated, for instance, to their geographical origin and/or the know-how of their producers. However,the sophistication of fraudulent practices requires a continuous update of analytical platforms.Different analytical techniques have become extremely appealing since the instrumental analysistools evolution has substantially improved the capability to reveal and understand the complexityof food. In light of this, multi-elemental composition has been successful implemented solving aplethora of food authentication and traceability issues. In the last decades, it has existed anever-increasing trend in analysis based on spectrometry analytical platforms in order to obtain amulti-elemental profile that combined with chemometrics have been noteworthy analyticalmethodologies able to solve these problems. This review provides an overview of published reportsin the last decade (from 2011 to 2021) on food authentication and quality control from theirmulti-element composition in order to evaluate the state-of-the-art of this field and to identifythe main characteristics of applied analytical techniques and chemometric data treatments thathave permit achieve accurate discrimination/classification models, highlighting the strengths andthe weaknesses of these methodologies.