ABSTRACT
Food authenticity and safety are major issues requiring specific authorities and regulations worldwide. Consumers are becoming more apprehensive and critical, demanding quality food products and requesting a correct and trustworthy labelling along with safe food products. Labelling corroboration, verification and identification of food components and food microbial population must be achieved by food testing. Thus, technical approaches to identify false description and mislabelling are essential. This chapter discusses how Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is emerging in the food industry. NGS is an automated high-throughput sequencing technology that has proven to be potent, reliable and robust, with potential to be implemented in food and feed testing. First, this chapter describes and compares the different platforms commercially available. Then, with specific examples, it shows how NGS can help consumers to have access to safer and higher quality food. In a near future, this will be a powerful tool in food analysis since it may allow knowing the composition of a food product, its content in microorganisms and even its content in allergens in a single analytical step.
