Fighting Food Frauds Exploiting Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry Technologies: Scenario Comparison Between Solutions In Scientific Literature And Real Approaches In Place In Industrial Facilities

Fraud in food commodities is very common around the world and today occurs at different places of the supply chain: the demand for rapid and confirmatory analytical methods has increased in recent years. This paper intends to present a comparison between analytical chromatographic approaches, coupled with mass spectrometry (MS), solutions to detect food fraud suggested in scientific literature and practices actually implemented by food companies, taking into consideration four different types of matrixes/food chains (wheat/cereals, fruits, nuts and nut products, eggs & egg products). A selection of the more relevant papers published to date is presented and compared with the in-formation about industrial behaviour directly collected through informal interviews and official open-days & workshops; executed during FoodIntegrity European Funded EU-FP7 Project. The academic and food industry worlds are not aligned thus far and should interact better, exactly revolving around the flexibility and performances of chromatography-MS solutions. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.