Microfluidic analytical systems for food analysis

Assuring the safety and quality of food is vital in today’s world-wide integrated food supply chain. In this context, microfluidics is a technology that allows constructing small, fast and cheap microfluidic analytical systems. Microfluidic analytical systems are mainly used in biomedical applications. In this review, we survey some of the applications of microfluidic technology with respect to the development of high performance analytical devices for food analysis. We discuss the main challenges related to microfluidic applications and current trends towards building multi-purpose microfluidic platforms that integrate multiple unit operations for real food sample analysis.