What are the scientific challenges in moving from targeted to non-targeted methods for food fraud testing and how can they be addressed? – Spectroscopy case study

Terry F. McGrath,  Simon A. Haughey,  Jenny Patterson,  Carsten Fauhl-Hassek,  James Donarski,  Martin Alewijn,  Saskia van Ruth,  Christopher T. Elliott

Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

Key challenges faced by the research and testing communities are:

• There is a lack of guidelines/legislation for development of non-targeted methods.
• There is no common definition of terms leading to difficultly in interpretation of data.
• It is difficult to obtain authentic samples with full traceability for model building.
• There is a lack of guidelines and legislation concerning spiked samples.
• There is a lack of available certified reference materials.

In order to keep pace with those who perpetrate food fraud there is clearly a need for robust and reliable non-targeted methods that are available to many stakeholders.