producers in California to check uniform lemon maturation on field.
Other milestones were the introduction of electronic spectroscopic
devices between 1940 and 60 [7] (Fig. 3). With the availability of
commercialinstruments,thesedevices soonbecame essential components
of any food research laboratory, as they allowed to obtain
characteristic fingerprints of foods and of their components.
Also the evolution of chromatographic methods, spanning all
theXIXcentury, had a pivotal role in the development offood analysis
methods. Starting from the pivotal work of Martin and Synge [8]
on gas chromatography (GC) (Fig. 3) and the commercialization of
the first GC instruments in 1952, this technique soon evolved from
the use of packed columns to the more efficient capillary columns
in the ‘70s at the Hewlett-Packard laboratories, establishing GC as
an invaluable tool in food analysis [9]. Also liquid chromatography
(LC), born well before GC but limited by the lack of knowledge
of the basic mechanisms of its functioning as well as by the very
lengthy and solvent-consuming process, was revolutionized in the
same years by the introduction of high performance liquid chromatography
(HPLC) [10]. HPLC made possible for the first time the
highresolutionseparationof complexmixtures ofnon-volatile analytes
in much lower times (a few minutes) compared to classical LC
analyses.