Authentication and Traceability of valuable food regional excellence production from Piemonte and Liguria

The most important Italian food are those with a label of quality; their high commercial value is due to some organoleptic characteristics that are the result of particular things; traditional processing, environmental conditions, soil composition, cultivar. These peculiarities make Italian products unique, but they inspire a high number of food frauds: the most widespread are the false declaration of provenance, or use of raw matters different than those declared. The legislative framework only concerns the documentation checks and actually there is very few legislation on food controls based on a scientific methods. This produces wide fraud phenomena, because paper documentation can be easy falsified. To stop the counterfeits of Made in Italy it is necessary to develop analytical methods to recognize the origin of a food. This is possible through the use of two different approaches, the Traceability that concerning the possibility to link a foodstuff to its provenance soil, and relating the raw matter with the finished product and Authentication that regards the ability to recognize a food among other similar products, but with different characteristics of lesser value, for example a different production technique, different possibility to perform studies with the use of the Trace Elements and, the Lanthanides. These elements do not seem to enter in the vegetable metabolism, but they are absorbed passively, and in this way they represent a fingerprint of the territory of origin. Through the use of the Elemental Analysis, with ICP-MS system and a chemometric approach, we developed an analytical method for Traceability and Authentication, and we tested them on some valuable Italian foodstuffs, mainly products in the Piemonte and Liguria region: milk and cream (Piemonte), Olive Oil obtained from Taggiasca cultivar (Liguria), Mushrooms (Piemonte and Liguria), Rice (Piemonte) and Wine must (Piemonte).