Tracing the origin of foodstuff: a chemometric challenge

The increased information available to the consumers together with the competition following the institution of the Common Market (EU countries) has led safety, nutritional value, eating characteristics, ethical, environmental, economic and social aspects to be more and more important and essential topics for the food industry. In a single word, there is an increasing demand for “quality”, as a primary criterion to access the market. Accordingly, a particular aspect of quality which has been gathering more and more attention during the recent years is that of the typicity of the product. In fact, it has been widely reported in the literature that the geographic, production and species origin of a foodstuff are important variables regulating the overall quality of the product. This issue has been recognized by the European Union by the introduction of the Designations of Origin (PDO and PGI). The products which are labeled by this Denomination must be produced in a well defined geographic area and manufactured using only one or few specified botanical or animal varieties. As a consequence, having accurate and precise analytical methods for the traceability of the origin of a foodstuff is an issue that is becoming more and more relevant. In this framework, while the possibility of identifying chemical markers of geographic, production or species origin is currently being explored using different fingerprinting techniques, it is widely recognized that, whatever the technique(s) chosen, the use of mathematical and statistical methods (chemometrics) to process the experimental data is essential to obtain a reliable authentication of the product. In this communication, the successful use of different chemometric pattern recognition methods for the traceability of food products will be presented.