ANALYTICAL AUTHENTICATION OF ORGANIC FOODS

Summary

A growing consumers’ awareness of human health’s risks, environmental fragility, and animal welfare has boosted organic production of foods. Due to their high production costs, however, organic products tend to retail at a higher prices than their non-organic counterparts. This premium price exposes organic products to fraud and counterfeiting, which, in addition to administrative controls, call for confirmatory assessments of the organic identity. Authentication of organic products is a complex task, which requires the identification, quantification, and distribution analysis of multiple compounds which are considered discriminators (i.e., fingerprints) between organic and non-organic products. Unlike conventional analytical methods, in fact, identifying, in foods, a single marker of authenticity would be, if even possible, useless. Selective fingerprinting uses state-of-the-art mass spectrometry, and a variety of spectroscopies to determine multiple chemical fingerprints in the organic product; in addition, these techniques produce large numbers of data which enable a statistical verification (for example,by multivariate statistical protocols) of the authenticity of the product. The talk gives an overview of fingerprinting approaches and their application to the authentication of real-life foods, such as eggs, meat, tomatoes, cereals, fruits, and coffee.