Dear Colleagues,

With the “from farm to fork” approach, the EU has in recent years promoted the principles and policies of quality and safety of food products and their production processes. In particular, typical and traditional productions have been awarded with recognizable marks and geographical indications that protect the names of the food and the savoir-faire of local producers. Many countries have adopted similar strategies to improve the quality of their food and commodities.

Although geographical indications were mainly developed to facilitate the intellectual property protection of qualifying products, consumers have become accustomed to identifying these appellations as a guarantee of quality, safety, and origin for the products, namely of the authenticity of the food.

On these bases, the certification of the authenticity of a product is of great relevance both for farmers, who may eventually benefit from an economic point of view by increasing their prices, and for consumers who may ask for even more detailed information about a food—in fact, the more a customer knows about a product’s origin and production, the greater the level of confidence they will have in the production processes. For these reasons, assessing the authenticity of a food and its geographical origin is a challenging issue, especially if the authenticity is evaluated based on objective parameters that overcome subjectivity and paper-based certifications. Consequently, technical approaches are becoming more and more complex.

In this context, technical improvements are visible in many research fields, spanning, for example, from the new generation of mass spectrometry instruments, both for organic and inorganic analytes, to enhancements in NMR spectroscopy. These have led to new opportunities in holistic approaches to geographical traceability and authenticity of food products, including the possibility of combining the high throughput of modern instrumentation with the interpretation capabilities of chemometric tools as a hybrid technique for big data analysis.

In addition to the knowledge acquired on particular food chains, thanks to the application of new analytical approaches, investigations have in many cases opened new windows on issues still not sufficiently explored or for which there is still an open debate among researchers. Typical examples are the mass-dependent fractionation process for heavy elements that take places during the nutrient uptake of the plant, the development of predictive models using chemometric tools to establish food authenticity, etc.

The main aim of this Special Issue is to focus on the latest works concerning the methodological and technological approaches in geographical traceability of food products. We believe that this issue will represent a valuable reference for scientific researchers interested in this field. Therefore, we encourage the submission of state-of-the-art papers to be published, including original research, communications and review articles, highlighting recent advances in food traceability, and related aspects, using different analytical techniques, which represent the challenges of research in this field.

Dr. Andrea Marchetti
Dr. Simona Sighinolfi
Guest Editors

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• food authenticity
• geographic traceability
• food quality
• light Isotopes
• heavy Isotopes
• elemental composition
• molecular fingerprinting
• chemometrics