Conventional methods for food quality evaluation based on chemical or microbiological analysis followed by traditional univariate statistics such as ANOVA are considered insufficient for some purposes. More sophisticated instrumental methods including spectroscopy and chromatography, in combination with multivariate analysis-chemometrics, can be used to determine food authenticity, identify adulterations or mislabeling and determine food safety. The purpose of this review is to present the current state of knowledge on the use of chemometric tools for evaluating quality of food products of animal and plant origin and beverages. The article describes applications of several multivariate techniques in food and beverages research, showing their role in adulteration detection, authentication, quality control, differentiation of samples and comparing their classification and prediction ability.
Keywords: Chemometrics; adulteration; authenticity; food quality control; multivariate tools.