Abstract: Food safety and quality are the basis and prerequisite for ensuring the harmonious and stable development of the modern economy and society. At present, foodborne pathogens, veterinary drug residues, genetically modified foods and adulteration cause or may cause food safety hazards. Metabolomics is an emerging technology that can be used to identify and monitor various trace food safety hazard factors by detecting the changes of small-molecule metabolites in organisms caused by exogenous disturbances, which will help to explore the metabolic mechanism. Furthermore, metabolites resulting from the degradation of food hazard factors can be potential biomarkers of food hazards, providing insights into the mechanism of action of foodborne pathogens and setting the stage for food quality and safety control. This review article describes targeted and non-targeted metabolomics, as well as the data acquisition and mathematical statistics methods commonly used for metabolomics. The recent progress in the application of metabolomics in the field of food quality and safety is summarized such as the detection of foodborne pathogens, veterinary drug residues, genetically modified foods, fresh produce quality, and meat adulteration. This review concludes with an outlook on the joint application of multi-omics technologies, which is expected to promote the wider application of metabolomics in the field of food safety and quality.

Key words: metabolomics; food safety; technology platform; application