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Received Dec 22, 2017; Revised Feb 19, 2018; Accepted Feb 21, 2018
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Since ancient times, food items have been manipulated and altered by humans to improve their quality properties. The number of food products placed on the market after being modified to improve their organoleptic properties and prolong their shelf-life has increased significantly in the last two centuries. Unfortunately, food manipulation for illegal purposes (e.g., by using low-quality ingredients in the manufacture of products that are instead commercialized as high-quality food) has also become a widespread practice. Food adulteration, or “food fraud,” occurs when an ingredient is partially or fully replaced with other food components unexpected from the consumer and whose presence is not indicated in the food label. Such a practice has become a concern on a global scale not only for consumers but also for producers and distributors and although it is not a new problem, quantifying its economic and public health impact is still a difficult task [1]. Globalization, urbanization, and consolidation of manufacturing are only some of the instances that contribute to the rapid growth of frauds. In particular, the demands of expanding urban population require more complex food production chains and global economics facilitate criminal activity, since remoteness and anonymity are often characteristics of some food supply chains [2]. On the other hand, the awareness of consumers on their purchases, regarding how, where, and when a food product has been produced, is growing year by year. These concerns were the drivers that prompted legislation to develop reliable procedures to assess the quality and safety requirements of the whole supply chain. The scandals concerning food security, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or the recent discovery of the illegal introduction of horse into meat products, have attracted media and consumer attention and further contributed to the creation of food traceability tools. To address this concern, several analytical methods, aiming at tracing eventual contaminants and/or adulterating substances introduced into foods, have been devised over the last years.
In general, the developed methods can use either the microbiological or the chemical...