The volatile metabolome — gas chromatography–mass spectrometry approaches in the context of food fraud

This work discusses food authentication tools based on the volatile metabolome assessed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) serve as markers for food flavour and aroma and, in some cases, they hold potential for food authentication. On top of this, advanced data analysis approaches enhance analytical data extraction and understanding. Untargeted methods provide comprehensive authenticity insights, surpassing traditional targeted approaches, and automated processing improves robustness and reduces user dependency. Chemometric tools, particularly classification methods, are extensively used for authentication based on both GC-MS fingerprinting and untargeted profiling of VOCs. Despite challenges in transferability, untargeted methods perform well in authentication models, making them valuable for internal quality control and official control guidance for fraud detection. This work highlights the need for further research to establish untargeted authentication tools as official methods in the near future. • Besides economic impact, food fraud loss of traceability jeopardizes food safety. • Food volatile metabolome is a reliable marker for quality authentication. • Untargeted GC-MS analysis provides analytical key-features for food authentication • Cumbersome identification of certain semi-VOCs is avoided in untargeted methods • Chemometrics tools allow building authentication models based on GC-MS data