Final report for the CORE Organic II funded project - Fast methods for authentication of organic plant based foods - AuthenticFood

Summary

In AuthenticFood a wide range of analytical methods have been developed and validated for authentication of organic plant products. These have been applied to plant samples from Danish and Italian field trials and independent test-set samples. It has been shown that several analytical methods have the potential to authenticate the geographical and/or the agricultural origin of plant products. Elemental fingerprint analysis is particularly suitable for revealing where a plant has been grown due to the inherently different soil mineralogy of geographical locations across Europe. When zooming in on individual elements by stable isotope analysis it is also possible to reveal how a plant has been fertilized – especially when focusing on isotopes of specific plant compounds such as amino acids and oxygen containing anions. Metabolomic profiling has also proven valuable for discriminating between organic and conventional plant products when combined with multivariate statistics.