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Authenticity is a quality criterion for food and food ingredients, and is required more and more worldwide, as a result of legislative protection for regional foods. Reviews of analytical methods for the determination of geographical origin of food and beverages have been published . Organic components of a food-crop production depend on various conditions (e.g., fertilization, history of the field, climatic conditions in the year of cultivation, geographic location and soil composition), so it is not always possible to determine the origin of a product by analyzing the organic components. Methods based on elemental composition have been reviewed as have methods based on isotope ratios. Over the past decade, with the development of new advanced analytical techniques we can successfully retrieve elemental and isotopic compositions of any given food sample and determine the geographic origin successfully. The growing concern of the consumers stimulated scientific research and publications in recent years, including multi-element and isotope-ratio methods of analysis in food authentication after statistical evaluation of the results.
About the author
Biljana Balabanova is an Associate Professor at "Goce Delchev" University, North Macedonia. She received her PhD in 2014 in the area of Analytical Chemistry. She is lecturing Chemistry and Biochemistry for the students of biotechnical sciences. Her scientific expertise is in the field of analytical applications of atomic and mass spectrometry.
