Recent Advances in Analysis of Food and Beverages

1. Introduction

In this section, we summarize the characteristics of the published papers according to different typologies. Regarding the origin of the contributors, the vast majority are European and Asian, most notably Chinese authors who have a dozen publications. Among the European group, authors come from more than ten countries. It should be mentioned that almost 15% are the result of international collaborations, and approximately 50% involve various institutions, thus pointing out that most rely on the cooperation of others’ expertise.

The research topics according to samples/matrices are depicted in the scheme of Figure 1. Numerous papers deal with medicinal and aromatic plants that can be used as condiments or for food supplementation [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. There are also several studies on fruits and juices [11,12,13]. Other matrices to highlight are oils [14,15,16], milk [17,18], and food residues [12,19]. Regarding the latter point, great efforts are made to revalorize them within the framework of a circular economy, pursuing the recovery of bioactive compounds with high added value with, for instance, antioxidant and antiproliferative activities.

The vast majority of the papers propose profiling studies, establishing and applying methods to determine the composition of certain families of analytes such as phenolic and flavonoid compounds [1,4,5,6,11,12,13], xenobiotics (pesticides or antibiotics) [17,20,21,22], cyano or mycotoxins [18,23,24,25], lipids, fatty acids, and volatile organic compounds [2,7,15]. Only a couple of studies are approached from the point of view of untargeted analysis or fingerprinting strategies [26]. This last option is, however, one of the most promising approaches to authenticate food and beverages. Figure 2 summarizes the distribution according to analyte families is as follows.

2. Conclusions

From the editorial board of the “Analysis of food and beverages” section, we want to thank all the authors that have participated this year to enhance the success of Separations MDPI, as well as those colleagues who have collaborated as academic editors, guest editors of Special Issues, and reviewers. We want to encourage the scientific community to submit their excellent research on food and beverage analysis to Separations. Currently, 16 Special Issues led by prestigious scientists are available, and we are excited to receive new proposals. For the next year, we expect to deal with new trendy topics such as fundamentals in separation science, chemometrics for food authentication, ion mobility spectrometry, and microchip-based devices, focusing on relevant applications to food science. Reviews on methodological and applied issues will also be welcome. With everyone’s efforts, we will contribute to the strengthening and growth of this “Analysis of Food and Beverages” section and, globally, the Separations journal.