Spreker: Marije Strikwold

Every day we consume food—sometimes produced locally, but very often sourced from all over the world. Many food products are complex mixtures of multiple ingredients, making their origin and composition less transparent than we might expect. News reports regularly confront consumers with cases of food fraud, which can undermine trust in the food market. Beyond misleading consumers, food fraud creates unfair competition and, in some cases, even poses risks to human health.

Ensuring both food safety and authenticity is therefore essential. But how can chemical knowledge contribute to a fair and transparent food supply chain, and help rebuild consumer confidence? In this lecture, I will show how high-resolution mass spectrometry (HR-MS) can be used to reveal the chemical fingerprints of food products, enabling us to assess their authenticity and detect food fraud. This talk will highlight how chemistry plays a key role in tackling real-world challenges in our global food system.