Recent progress in food quality control through flavor analysis using gas chromatography–ion mobility spectrometry

With the improvement of food safety requirements, rapid, nondestructive, accurate, and high-throughput determination of volatile ingredients plays an important role in the analysis area. Owing to the advantages of high separation efficiency, high sensitivity, no sample pretreatment requirement, and fast response, gas chromatography–ion mobility spectrometry (GC–IMS) is important in the nondestructive and rapid detection of volatile organic compounds in the fields of biology, pathology, and food science. In the end, current GC–IMS applications in food safety control and quality analysis are systematically reviewed based on developments in working principles, experimental processes, and methods in cheminformatics and bioinformatics. In addition, the latest developments and advances, practical challenges and limitations, and requirements for GC–IMS applications are also critically discussed, providing new insights into GC–IMS application in food science.