ABSTRACT
Food analysis is an important approach to understanding the impurities in food products as well as developing new techniques for their quality assessment and control. Many technologies have been established to analyze these molecules of interest in foods. Moreover, mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) offers a unique opportunity to explore the spatial-chemical information from numerous food samples. This chapter discusses the principles of different mass spectrometry techniques, typical instrumental setups, and applications in different types of food samples. The future perspective of MSI is also briefly discussed. MSI has been successfully utilized to a variable degree for obtaining information about the spatial distribution of a variety of molecules and metabolites in foods. The analysis of localization of functional constituents in herbal medicine products via MSI is also discussed.
