Mass Spectrometry Imaging in Food: The Power and the Limits

LCGC International spoke to Laura Righetti of Wageningen University & Research and Wageningen Food Safety Research about mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) in food safety and authenticity, the subject of her RAFA 2026 talk, "Imaging Food: The Power and the Limits of Seeing Molecules in Food." MSI shows where a contaminant or marker compound sits within a food sample, without staining or labels, at a time when laboratories want to know why a hazard arises as well as how much is present. Ion mobility and multireflecting time-of-flight instruments now give MSI much of the molecular specificity that chromatographic separation provides in liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS). Even so, Righetti expects most food companies to outsource MSI to specialist laboratories for the next 5 to 10 years.