The precise authentication of food products is an essential step in an informed consumer choice. Mainly when it comes to meat and dairy products, special consideration to be given for correct labeling as a result of several reasons such as health concerns, religious beliefs, consumer safety and to promote fair trade. There are many methods which are being followed from ages for species identification and most of them are based on either protein or DNA analysis. Next generation sequencing [NGS], a DNA analysis method has been recognized as one of the most reliable technique for species identification. Due to the untargeted nature of NGS, millions of sequences can be produced from individual sequences using different templates at a time which results in detection of thousands of species in each sample. There is no prerequisite knowledge of which target to look for as universal primers are used instead of taxa-specific primers. Being an emerging technology, new NGS platforms are being developed to revolutionize food authenticity testing. This study focuses on why NGS is recognized as the most powerful technology among other DNA based methods for food analysis and provides an overview of the current range of NGS platforms used for meat and dairy product authentication and the potential future development of this technology

Keywords : Authenticity, Next Generation Sequencing, Ion Torrent, Metabarcoding, Bioinformatics, Pyrosequencing.