Traceability and Authenticity of high-valued dairy products by combining Analytical and Chemometric methods

An extended and updated list of analytical techniques for confirmation of food authentication and to support law enforcement is nowadays strongly demanded by food safety and quality control organizations all over the world, presiding over the farm to fork continuum of each specific sector of food. Analytical Chemistry can give a decisive answer in this direction playing an active role in restoring dignity to traditional food species, due to the potentiality of many available techniques to provide traceability and authenticity information. The scientific community is indeed offering proven, accurate and reliable methods to protect and clearly distinguish high-valued food products from any illegal substitutes setting-up applications as fast, efficient, cheap, and easily applicable (at custom level) as possible. Into an era of high-throughput analytical devices, Chemometrics, giving the necessary multivariate statistical-mathematical and computing expertise, is co-evolving fast together with Analytical Chemistry. From the food-traceability and authentication point of view, in particular, Chemometrics grants the need to extract only relevant information and obtain reliable models capable of inferring the underlying relationships which link the complex compositional profile of food products and processing conditions to very general end-properties of foodstuffs, such as healthiness, consumer perception, or to a specific territory. Authenticity and traceability, then, are inherently multivariate, covering many different aspects: chemical and physical characterization, adulteration, discrimination, mislabeling, and monitoring of the production process. Under these perspectives, the research studies the present PhD thesis lays on involve the development of new analytical methods reinforced by Chemometrics to handle different food traceability and authentication cases. The bulls-eye has been focused on the dairy sector, characterized by several decades of increased market disturbance. A number of intervention mechanisms have been indeed put in place to promote and protect the milk sector and give it back value. Nowadays, milk sector represents a significant proportion of the value of European Union-agricultural output. Total EU milk production is estimated to be second only to India; moreover, EU is a major exporter of dairy products and the biggest one in the world for cheese. More in details, the reader will be led through different applications handling several food-related issues, focusing on dairy products: from the authentication of cheeses labeled with quality schemes, to the contamination of niche products with cheaper one, and the monitoring of storage conditions. Both targeted analysis, giving information about singular molecular and atomic species, and fingerprinting techniques, providing convoluted profiles of foodstuffs, have been employed and compared in performances in this thesis. Exploratory multivariate analysis and different single- and multi-block supervised pattern recognition methods have been employed to interpret the instrumental outputs. The excellent results obtained in the reported applications support the effective and indispensable role of chemometric processing in the field of food control to handle such complex matrices, like dairy products are. For my own part I hope to have made a good service to the scientific community, providing another brick in the wall in such greatly discussed and of real-time-interest field of knowledge.