In the food research and production field, system complexity is increasing and several new challenges are emerging every day. This implies an urgent necessity to extract information and obtain models capable of inferring the underlying relationships that link all the variability sources which characterize food or its production process (e.g. compositional profile, processing conditions) to very general end properties of foodstuff, such as the healthiness, the consumer perception, the link to a territory and the effect of the production chain itself on food. This makes a ‘deductive’ theory-driven research approach inefficient, as it is often difficult to formulate hypotheses. Explorative multivariate data analysis methods, together with the most recent analytical instrumentation, offer the possibility to come back to an ‘inductive’ data-driven attitude with a minimum of a priori hypotheses, instead helping in formulating new ones from the direct observation of data. The aim of this chapter is to offer the reader an overview of the most significant tools that can be used in a preliminary, exploratory phase, ranging from the most classical descriptive statistics methods, to multivariate analysis methods, with particular attention to projection methods. For all techniques, examples are given so that the main advantage of these techniques, which is a direct, graphical representation of data and their characteristics, can be immediately experienced by the reader.
In the last decades, mankind has become totally aware about the importance of food quality: nowadays authentication and traceability are words of general use. Food authentication verifies how much a food is in accordance with its label description and law and it could be considered a further guarantee for the quality and safety of a foodstuff. The traceability of food could be considered an essential element in ensuring safety and high quality of food. The synergistic use of instrumental analytical techniques and chemometrics represents a promising way to obtain trustworthy results in the development of authenticity and traceability models. This chapter deals with the potentialities of chemometrics tools in resolving some real issues related to food traceability and authenticity. Particular attention will be paid to the use of some exploratory, classification, and discrimination techniques. In the first part of this chapter, a briefly description of European regulations (Authenticity and Traceability: the European Union point of view), and traceability and authenticity markers (Authenticity and Traceability: a scientific point of view) is reported. The second part is split into two sections: namely Food Authenticity and Food Traceability applications, where the main features and advantages of some chemometrics approaches are presented.
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