Special issue “Application of spectroscopy in food analysis”

“Man is what he eats”: food represents one of the fundamental needs for human beings, and, therefore, food analysis is a field of utmost importance. At the same time, given its inherent complexity, this subject encompasses multiple aspects, e.g., safety of use, health requirements, compliance to laws, organoleptic characteristics, and consumers’ acceptance, and they are often intertwined. In this context, spectroscopy serves as a suitable tool, as it is versatile, relatively rapid, non-destructive (or, at least, micro-destructive), and, in many cases, it requires minimum sample manipulation or pretreatment, thus representing a green alternative to other state-of-the-art methods. The present special issue has been proposed with the aim of collecting studies describing interesting/relevant problems in food analysis and, ideally, suggesting strategies for solving/handling them. Among the 15 submitted manuscript, 10 were published (66.6% publication rate), indicating the high scientific level of the authors who decided to contribute. The published papers encompass different aspects and scopes: authenticating and/or characterizing foodstuffs, detecting frauds, and ensuring law/sanitary compliance. In particular, of these, three papers present diverse methodologies for quality assessment of food products by means of quantification of specific constituents, two are focused on the employment of classification tools for tracing high-valued foodstuffs, one aims at proposing a strategy for detecting frauds and, eventually, two are reviews, one about the most widely used chemometric tools in food analysis, and the other one focalized on authentication and traceability of seafood products.