Innovative analytical strategies coupled with multivariate analysis to deal with complex issues in food integrity, food authenticity and sensomics

Abstract

Fraud in food commodities is widespread around the world and today occurs on different levels of the supply chain. Illegal fraud not only represents a problem for consumer safety but also sometimes affects the quality of products. For this reason, the demand for rapid and confirmatory analytical methods capable of detecting fraud has increased in recent years, and several scientific publications are focused on this topic. This project is aimed to develop several analytical strategies, together with sensory analysis, merged with a statistical multivariate and data fusion approach, for the Italian geographical assessment of dehydrated apples and hazelnuts, protecting the “100 % Italian” claim of Barilla products. In particular, employing Barilla, University of Parma, Merieux NutriSciences facilities, differences in analytical outcome from Italian and EU, and extra-EU countries were unveiled.