The advancement of the assessment of food quality control as stressed by recent development in analytical chemistry

Several aspects of food quality control (identity and quality) are discussed in this paper. Besides official and traditional methods, which are often time consuming and not always suitable to obtain an adequate description of the analysed food, a number of new methods have been developed within the last few years. The development of analytical methods depends on the development of analytical instrumentation and more accurate knowledge about food composition. Recent trends in food analysis control are to limitate at minimum sample manipulation and to reduce solvent utilisation. Thus, Supercritical Fluid Extraction, Solid Phase and Solid Phase Micro Extraction advantages are discussed, as well as a new analytical approach such as Hyphenated Techniques in Chromatography (LC-GC, LC-LC-GC) applied to trace analysis (PAHs), or volatile compounds stripping and GC-MS analysis applied to honey classification, aided by chemometric methods.