Novel analytical approaches to assess the quality of food products

In response to the increasing demand for healthy foods, industry is continuously evolving and reformulating traditional foods. Accordingly, several natural sources have been investigated to replace additives in traditional foods with natural ones and to implement corresponding quality. Analogously, several industrial processes have been reshaped to reduce formation of undesired contaminants. In the first context, bioactive extracts from plant and/or animal raw materials have been used to generate products with enhanced nutritional value and potential health benefits. For example, milk/egg raw materials have been used as additives since they contain functional peptides. Besides their potential importance for functional applications, these peptides and their modifications can also be used as markers to monitor product thermal history and storage. In the latter context, several industrial processes have been redesigned to reduce product thermal treatments and corresponding undesired contaminants, e.g. acrylamide, Maillard products and others. Based on the recent introduction of very accurate and sensitive instruments, above mentioned themes need an update of existing analytical methods or the introduction of innovative approaches for unsolved issues. Moreover, food industry also needs fast, economic, easy to use and connect instrumental tools to comparatively evaluate the volatilomic profile of traditional and novel products to assess the impact of innovative goods with respect to consumer’s satisfaction.

Novel methods for the quali-quantitative assessment of bioactive substances (e.g. plant polyphenols and animal peptides) in functionalized food products will be developed. Similarly, dedicated protocols will be set up for the quantitative determination of acrylamide and Maillard products in treated foods. Accordingly, target compounds will be assessed by NMR spectroscopy, and Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography (U-HPLC) coupled with photodiode array detector and/or high-resolution mass spectrometry procedures. Dedicated bioinformatic procedures will be implemented to analyze resulting data. On the other hand, a new generation of Metal Oxides (MOX) gas sensors using different sensing materials and structures will be tested to identify the most performing arrays monitoring volatile markers related to specific products with the ultimate goal lof ensuring composition compliance. Volatilomics will explore the most accurate sensor array creating a IoT real time monitoring device. Lab test will be then run with controlled gases to test the sensitivity of the instrument prototypes, and data analysis will be performed to train artificial neural networks and develop proper predictive algorithms.

Development of novel foodomic methods to quali-quantitatively evaluate peptide, polyphenol, acrylamide and Maillard product content in selected foods (eggs, milk, vegetables, fried material, coockies). Characterization and quantitation of bioactive compounds will be used to implement the evaluation of potential bioactivities in transformed goods as well as to assess food qualitative characteristics, thermal treatment history, and storage.
Application of the developed foodomic methods will determine the main bioactive compounds and contaminants in traditional foods and the corresponding implemented product analogues.
Creation of sensor array to prototype a new technology based in the application of MOX gas sensor and AI algorithms to assess the composition compliance of the target products.