Food Authentication

<p>The authentication of foods and beverages is a very current topic of great interest for all the actors involved in the food chain including the food industry consumers and food science researchers. Food authenticity covers many different aspects related to mislabeling adulteration and misleading claims about origin production methods or processing technologies. As many factors may affect the chemical composition of foods (e.g. geographical origin variety or breed conditions of cultivation and breeding and/or feeding) the implementation of accurate robust and high-throughput analytical methods is needed to assess their authenticity and traceability and consequently guarantee their safety and quality in terms of organoleptic nutritional and bioactive characteristics. For these purposes multiple analytical tools can be employed in combination with advanced chemometrics such as spectroscopic and chromatographic techniques DNA-based methods and state-of-the-art omics approaches. In this context in 2020 the journal <em>Foods</em> launched the Special Issue Food Authentication: Techniques Trends and Emerging Approaches to gather research papers and review articles dealing with the development and application of analytical techniques and emerging approaches in food authentication. Considering the success and popularity of this earlier Special Issue we will now release a second Special Issue comprising ten valuable scientific contributions including one review article one commentary article and eight original research articles.</p>