Current trends and advanced techniques for Chinese green tea authenticity verification: A thorough review

Green tea, a beverage with a reputation for natural goodness and health benefits, is a popular choice among consumers. The quality of green tea is influenced by several factors, including variety, grade, origin, and processing technology. However, the widespread problems in the market, such as selling seconds at best quality prices, origin fraud, grade mislabeling, and adulteration, question the authenticity of green tea, thus requiring continuous modernization and improvement of related analytical methodologies for quality control. This review provides a comprehensive review of the current advances of research in Chinese green tea authenticity tracing technologies, focusing on the applications of sensory evaluation, spectroscopy, mass spectrometry combined with other techniques, bionic electronic sensors, metabolomics, and sensor array technologies in this field. By analysing in detail the principles, application examples, advantages, and limitations of the various technologies, and by combining them with the role of chemometrics in processing complex data, it explores how these technologies can identify the authenticity of green tea from different perspectives. This review also explores innovative trends and future development directions in this field, indicating that portable sensors based on novel nanomaterial composites will emerge as a new trend in this domain.