FOOD AUTHENTICITY AND CONTROL METHODS

Food authenticity is a subject that is important not only for consumer protection, but also for maintaining fair competition. This term defines whether a food carries its own characteristics or not. These characteristics can be associated with the origin of the food (region, varieties etc.), production method or composition of the food (adulteration, fraudulent etc.). In order to ensure the food authenticity, identification of control criteria and validated analytical methods are required primarily. Moreover new applications in the field of food authenticity must be developed depending on the improvements in the technique of adulteration. This review focuses on the basic analytical methods used for food authenticity control (spectrophotometric, electrophoretic, electronic, DNA-based, immunological) and its application areas.