Abstract: Monitoring of food chemical hazards (FCHs) is crucial to ensure food quality and safety. Non-targeted screening (NTS) is an effective technique to identify a wide range of potential and unknown FCHs using high performance liquid chromatography/high performance gel chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (HPLC/HPGC-HRMS) platforms with strong separation capability, high mass resolution and high mass accuracy. However, the development and application of NTS methods are still challenging due to the wide variety of FCHs, the large amount of acquired data, and the cumbersome analysis process. Selecting an appropriate data acquisition mode and an effective non-targeted data analysis strategy are essential to successfully identify potential and unknown FCHs. This paper reviews the data acquisition modes, analysis processes and strategies involved in NTS and the application of NTS for FCHs screening in the past five years, in order to promote the development of NTS methods for FCHs and to provide support for the early warning of risk factors in foods and food safety monitoring.

Key words: food chemical hazards; high resolution mass spectrometry; non-targeted screening; data acquisition mode; analysis strategy; food quality and safety