Fraud in food commodities is very common around the world and today occurs at different places of the supply chain: the demand for rapid and confirmatory analytical methods has increased in recent years. Recently, consumers have increased attention on the safety, authenticity and quality of food commodities [1], and the development of reliable methods to detect fraud could better preserve the quality of production, with an advantage for the industry and the final consumer, who would have more confidence in the quality and safety of the product. Current governance of food supply chains, through certifications, inspections and audit controls, has historically been indeed developed, with a focus on food safety. However, criminal actions not only involve the adulteration of raw materials or finished products, but also the fraudulent declaration of the geographical origin of commodities. However, sometimes it seems that the new analytical methods developed and presented in the peer-reviewed journals are not applied or even not known by the industrial quality control laboratories. An effective analytical testing strategy is a key element in the fight against food fraud and one of the major components of a Food Fraud Vulnerability Mitigation Plan. Its purpose is not just to detect a potential fraud event but also to act as a deterrent and contribute to its prevention [2]. A fraudster is likely to think twice about supplying suspicious product to a company known to operate a comprehensive testing system. Indeed, the same notion could apply to a country that has stringent and regularly enforced regulations in place when compared to one with a lax regulatory system. Chromatographic techniques are widely used in food authentication as a means of separating and quantifying chemically similar constituents of a foodstuff. The components areseparated between two phases, a stationary and a mobile phase, the separation resulting from the different strengths of adsorption of the different molecules between the two phases. Techniques used in food analysis include gas chromatography (GC) and liquid chromatography (LC) depending on the state—gas or liquid—of the mobile phase. Highperformance or high-pressure LC (HPLC) is the most commonly used LC technique, in which the solvent of the mobile phase is pumped through the column. Other variants of chromatography include thin-layer chromatography that uses a solid, planar surface and a liquid mobile phase, and capillary electrophoresis involving electrokinetic separation.
