Capabilities and limitations of LIBS in food analysis

Food is the main source of different elements which are essential, trace and fundamental for human diet and health. The type and level of elements in foods indicates whether it's toxic or not. Therefore, determination of elements and their amounts is crucial for food safety and quality. In order to fulfill the increasing demand on multi-elemental information for product monitoring, rapid and sensitive analytical techniques which are capable of detecting major and trace elements with good precision and accuracy are required. In this review, the most recent literature about the use of LIBS for the analysis of food and capabilities and limitations of LIBS on foods have been reported. This review provides comprehensive overview of the applications on food quality and fraud monitoring of several foods, sampling techniques and some limitations of LIBS. Furthermore, it provides a critical outlook on the developments to analyze food matrices with proper sample preparations.