FIA-HRMS fingerprinting subjected to chemometrics as a valuable tool to address food classification and authentication: Application to red wine, paprika, and vegetable oil samples.

The rise of food fraud practices, affecting a wide variety of goods and their specific characteristics (e.g., quality or geographical origin), demands rapid high-throughput analytical approaches to ensure consumers protection. In this context, this study assesses flow injection analysis coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (FIA-HRMS), using a fingerprinting approach and combined with chemometrics, to address four food authentication issues: (i) the geographical origin of three Spanish red wines, (ii) the geographical origin of three European paprikas, (iii) the distinction of olive oil from other vegetable oils and (iv) the assessment of its quality category. In each case, negative and positive ionisation FIA-HRMS fingerprints, and two different data fusion strategies, were evaluated. After external validation, excellent classification accuracies were reached. Moreover, high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) allowed sample matrices characterisation by the putative identification of the most common ions.