Mass Spectrometry in Food Quality and Safety: An Overview of the Current Status

Abstract In recent years, mass spectrometry has gained a wide recognition as a selective and fast technique for the analysis and assessment of a wide range of food products. The state of the art in the determination of safety and quality of food is presented to illustrate the capability of this technique for classification and grading, defect and disease detection, distribution and visualization of chemical attributes, and evaluations of overall quality of meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, and other food products. The features of mass spectrometry for each category were summarized in the aspects of the investigated quality and safety attributes, the used systems (triple quadrupole, quadrupole time-of-flight, orbitrap, acquisition mode), the data analysis methods (feature extraction, multivariate calibration, variables selection), and the performance (correlation, error, visualization). With its success in different applications of food quality and safety analysis and assessment, it is evident that mass spectrometry can facilitate a variety of routine inspection tasks.