Dear Colleagues,

The term “food quality” represents a multi-faceted concept that comprises a wide range of food characteristics aside from sensory properties, ranging from health-related properties (e.g., nutritional and nutraceutical aspects) to safety concerns (e.g., the absence of contamination, fraud, or chemical changes during processing and storage) and socio-cultural considerations (e.g., geographical origin). If a sensory evaluation often meets consumers’ expectations and subjective acceptance criteria, other features can be scientifically (and thus objectively) evaluated. For this purpose, a number of analytical strategies have been successfully exploited, and new approaches are continuously being developed, which increasingly pose a challenge to the scientific community.

This Special Issue aims to collect valuable contributions to these topics, in the form of both original research papers and review articles.

Dr. Simona Piccolella
Prof. Dr. Severina Pacifico
Guest Editors

Dr. Marialuisa Formato
Guest Editor Assistant

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• food composition analysis
• chemical characterization
• extraction procedures
• spectroscopy
• mass spectrometry
• authenticity
• food fraud

• Food Chemistry: Food Quality and New Analytical Approaches in Molecules (13 articles)

Title: Impact of post-harvest period on chemical and sensorial properties of planifolia and pompona vanillas
Authors: Anaïck Ravier 1; Pauline Chalut1; Saida Belarbi1; Cyrille Santerre1; Nadine Vallet1; Zeineb Nhouchi1
Affiliation: ISIPCA. 34-36 Rue du Parc de Clagny, 78000 Versailles, France
Abstract: Vanilla production in Guadeloupe is expanding. The main species grown is Vanilla Planifolia, but other species such as Pompona are also present and required by industries. To upgrade the value of vanilla production on this Caribbean Island, this study was performed to evaluate the chemical and sensory specificities of these vanilla species. For this purpose, Vanilla Planifolia and Vanilla Pompona have been compared through the scald and scarification transformation processes, as well as two different refining times (T1 and T2). The obtained results showed a significant difference between the two species, where Vanillin was mostly present in Planifolia, unlike Pompona, where it was mainly rich in 4-methoxybenzyl alcohol. On the other hand, sensory analysis was carried out through sessions of terms generation for both olfaction and gustation after infusing vanilla beans in milk at a temperature of 95 °C. The application of factorial correspondence analysis (FAC) highlighted the impact of refining time and sensory protocol on olfactive and taste profiles of all vanilla species. These results were enhanced by the application of the agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC). The obtained dendrogram was composed of three groups according to their similarities, where Planifolia scalded and Pompona scarified belongs to the same groups for T1 while they were distinguished for T2 for both olfactory and taste evaluation. The combination of these analyses makes it possible to establish a chemical and organoleptic profile of vanillas. Varietal and processing factors both have a major impact on the aroma profile of vanillas.