ChemFoodChem

About ChemFoodChem

ChemFoodChem — Journal Profile

ChemFoodChem is a gold open access, peer-reviewed journal at the meeting point of chemistry and food science, published by Wiley-VCH in Weinheim, Germany, as part of the Chemistry Europe journal family. Its ISSN is 2510-9936, listed by Wiley-VCH as both the print and online ISSN, and the JournalsWorld record for this title carries the same number, confirming that the record and the Wiley journal are one and the same. The journal was launched in 2025, with Volume 1, Issue 1 appearing in January 2025, and it publishes four issues a year. Its editor-in-chief, named on the Wiley journal homepage, is Katja Glatz, supported by deputy editors and an editorial board chaired by specialists in food chemistry. ChemFoodChem was created to do something the established journal landscape had left undone: to give food chemistry — the chemistry of what food is, how it changes, how it nourishes, how it can harm and how it can be made more sustainably — a dedicated, fully open, international home of its own.

The name needs one clarification, because chemistry publishing contains several similarly styled titles from the same publisher family. ChemFoodChem belongs to a recognisable Chemistry Europe naming pattern alongside titles devoted to other interfaces of chemistry, but it is not a section, a special issue or a rebranding of any older food journal. It is a new journal with its own ISSN, its own editorial team and its own DOI suffix, cfch, visible in article identifiers such as 10.1002/cfch.70034. It should also not be confused with long-established food chemistry journals from other publishers, whose impact factors, rankings and archives belong to them alone. Everything in this profile refers only to the Wiley-VCH journal identified by ISSN 2510-9936, launched in 2025.

Why a new journal, and why in 2025

The launch announcement from Chemistry Europe, published through its ChemistryViews magazine in March 2025, presented ChemFoodChem as a complement to an existing suite of twenty high-profile peer-reviewed journals. The timing was deliberate. Food had moved to the centre of several scientific agendas at once: the chemistry of nutrition and health, the detection of contaminants and fraud, the sensory science behind acceptance of new products, the redesign of food production under climate pressure, the valorisation of side streams and by-products, and the search for new protein and ingredient sources all depend on chemical understanding, yet their authors were scattered across general chemistry journals, food science journals, nutrition journals and analytical journals. A dedicated title lets those communities read each other. It also lets editors build a coherent standard for what counts as a chemical contribution to a food question — molecular evidence, analytical rigour and mechanistic explanation — rather than leaving food papers to be judged as peripheral in a general journal or as insufficiently applied in a pure chemistry journal.

The journal's institutional backing reinforces that purpose. Chemistry Europe is an association of sixteen chemical societies from fifteen European countries, which collaboratively publish scientific journals and the ChemistryViews magazine, under the motto of work run by chemists, for chemists. ChemFoodChem has also been announced as the official journal of the Food Chemistry Division of EuChemS, the European Chemical Society's specialised network for food chemistry, which represents food chemistry sectors of national societies and works on harmonised education and research, food quality and safety, and collaboration among academia, industry, laboratories and policy actors. A society-linked launch gives a new journal something money cannot buy quickly: a founding community of authors, referees and readers who already meet through the division and the partner societies, and a conference and network circuit from which early content and editorial standards can be drawn.

Publisher and editorial leadership

The publisher of record is Wiley-VCH GmbH, Weinheim, the German scholarly publishing house within Wiley, and the journal sits on the Chemistry Europe hub of Wiley Online Library. Editorial leadership listed on the journal homepage at the time of research consists of Editor-in-Chief Katja Glatz; deputy editors Hanyi Xie, Yuzhu Song and Prisca-Maryla Henheik; and editorial board chairs Markus Fischer, Victor Freitas and Irena Vovk. Those names signal the journal's intended geography and subject balance: food chemistry leadership from European research centres with strong traditions in food analysis, wine and plant food chemistry, and analytical methods, combined with deputies who handle the daily flow of an international submission stream. As with any new journal, board composition will evolve, and authors should check the live homepage for the current team rather than relying on any static profile, including this one.

Editorially, the journal promises the rapid dissemination of original research, a commitment its publisher repeats in its journal description. For a gold open access title publishing four issues a year, speed normally comes from continuous online publication of accepted articles ahead of issue assembly, standard Wiley production systems, and DOI registration at acceptance. The journal welcomes preprints, according to the launch description, which means authors may share a manuscript publicly before or during review without that sharing disqualifying the work — a policy aligned with open science practice and useful for fast-moving topics such as contaminant detection methods or novel ingredient safety, where early visibility matters. Authors should still read the current author guidelines on Wiley Online Library for the exact preprint, data and reporting requirements that apply to their article type.

Scope in detail

Wiley describes the journal as showcasing research that combines chemistry and food science across the world, advancing understanding of food chemistry, safety, sensory science and nutritional aspects, together with agricultural chemistry. The launch description widens that into a working topic list: food chemistry, nutrition, food biotechnology, food safety, analytical chemistry, sustainable food technologies and agricultural chemistry. Read together, the scope covers the full life of a food at the molecular level. It includes the composition and structure of food components — proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, polyphenols, aroma compounds, pigments and micronutrients — and how they interact. It includes the chemistry of processing and storage: oxidation, Maillard chemistry, enzymatic change, fermentation, encapsulation and delivery of bioactive compounds, and the formation of desirable and undesirable products during cooking and manufacture. It includes analytical chemistry for foods: methods to authenticate origin and detect adulteration, to measure contaminants, residues and allergens, and to characterise complex mixtures from honey and wine to oils and spices. It includes sensory and flavour chemistry, where molecules meet perception. It includes nutrition-facing chemistry, where a compound's fate, bioavailability and activity are studied chemically. And it includes the chemistry behind sustainable food systems, from green extraction and side-stream valorisation to alternative proteins and packaging-relevant materials.

Early published content shows the scope working as intended. The journal's covers and early articles include a review celebrating one hundred and fifty years of synthetic vanillin, tracing vanilla from its Mesoamerican origins to modern production and the analytical authentication of flavour samples; work on non-sterile cultivation of a thermophilic cyanobacterium for production of the carotenoid zeaxanthin at pilot scale; an integrated approach tracking pH through acidification, deacidification and fermentation for automated must and wine analysis; and a study of fermented black kale examining cholesterol-lowering and radical-scavenging potential from pilot-scale production to an in vivo study. Flavour history, wine analytics, algal production systems and functional food evaluation sit side by side in a single young journal — exactly the cross-reading the founders intended, united by chemical method and chemical explanation rather than by a single commodity or a single technique.

Article types and who should submit

The launch description states that the journal publishes both primary and secondary peer-reviewed articles — in ordinary terms, original research articles and review-type literature, the standard mixture for a Chemistry Europe title, which typically also includes shorter and opinion formats described in its author guidelines. The best-fit author is a researcher whose work answers a food question with chemistry: a food chemist characterising a compound or reaction, an analytical chemist validating a detection method on real food matrices, a sensory scientist linking volatile profiles to perception, a nutrition researcher tracing a bioactive compound chemically, an agricultural chemist studying residues, soil-to-food pathways or crop chemistry, or a food technologist whose innovation rests on a chemical mechanism. Interdisciplinary teams are not merely tolerated here; they are the point. A paper pairing a chemistry group with a sensory panel, a nutrition group or an industry process team speaks directly to the journal's stated mission of fostering collaboration among researchers, educators and industry professionals.

Equally, authors should recognise what the journal is not. It is not a general food studies journal for social, economic or policy analysis without chemical content, not a clinical nutrition journal for human trials without a chemical core, and not a repository for routine compositional reports that apply a standard method to one more sample without new chemical insight. The editorial question, visible in every scope statement the publisher makes, is what the work adds to the understanding of the chemical principles underpinning food components, processing and safety. Manuscripts that state that contribution in the first paragraph of the introduction, support it with appropriate controls, replicates and analytical validation, and discuss it against the international literature will be the manuscripts that fit. Authors from outside Europe should note that the journal explicitly addresses a global authorship and readership; its European society base is an origin, not a boundary.

Open access model and author charges

ChemFoodChem is a gold open access journal: every article is freely readable by anyone, immediately, on Wiley Online Library, under Creative Commons licensing arrangements described in the journal's author materials, and the costs of publication are met on the author side rather than the reader side. In the Wiley system that normally means an article publication charge on acceptance, which may be covered in whole or in part where the corresponding author's institution, funder or society has a Wiley open access account or a transformative agreement, with eligibility judged at acceptance. The launch material does not fix a single charge figure in the sources used for this profile, and Wiley revises charges over time, so this profile does not state a specific amount: authors should check the current charge, licence choices, society member arrangements and any waiver provisions on the journal's author page before submitting, and should confirm with their institution whether an agreement covers this title. What can be stated with confidence is the direction of the model — free to read for the world, including the food industry practitioners, regulators, educators and researchers in lower-income settings whom subscription walls most often exclude — and that openness is a founding feature of the title, not an option added later.

Standing, metrics and honest limits

A journal launched in 2025 cannot have a long metric history, and any profile that decorated ChemFoodChem with an established impact factor, a mature h-index or a settled quartile would be inventing numbers. At the time of research, no Journal Impact Factor is claimed for this title in this profile, because a journal must complete the required citation windows and evaluation before such a figure exists, and no SCImago rank is asserted here for the same reason. The credentials the journal legitimately carries in its first years are of a different kind: a major scholarly publisher, the Chemistry Europe society family, official journal status for the EuChemS Food Chemistry Division, a named international editorial leadership, DOI-registered open access articles on Wiley Online Library, and a catalogue record — for example in the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology library catalogue — confirming Volume 1, Issue 1 of January 2025 and ISSN 2510-9936. Authors whose institutions require an indexed journal for a specific evaluation should check the current indexing position directly, since new Wiley titles are typically submitted to the major citation databases as they build a publication record, and the position will change during the journal's early volumes.

There is a fair counterweight for early-career and established authors alike. Publishing in a journal's founding volumes carries visibility advantages that a mature journal cannot offer: launch content is promoted through ChemistryViews and society channels, early articles face a readership actively curious about what the new title will become, and a paper that helps define a journal's scope can accumulate citations as the field gathers around it. The risk and the opportunity are the same fact — the journal is new — and authors should weigh it openly with co-authors and, where relevant, with the requirements of their funder or institution. For the right manuscript, especially one that speaks across food chemistry's sub-communities, the founding moment is a reason to submit, not a reason to wait.

Reading and citing ChemFoodChem

For readers, the journal is a single, open shelf on which the chemical literature of food is being assembled in real time: flavour and aroma chemistry, authenticity and fraud detection, contaminant and residue analysis, fermentation chemistry, functional ingredients, wine and beverage analytics, sustainable processing and new production organisms. Because nothing sits behind a paywall, it is unusually usable in teaching, in industry research and development, in regulatory and laboratory settings, and in countries where library subscriptions are thin. For citation, use the article DOI — the 10.1002 prefix with the cfch journal code — and the journal's ISSN 2510-9936, and take care not to credit its articles to similarly named sister titles. Judged on verified facts alone, ChemFoodChem is a significant structural addition to food science publishing: a society-backed, fully open, chemistry-first journal for a field whose questions — safer food, healthier food, more sustainable food — are among the most consequential in applied science.

How the journal fits the wider food chemistry landscape

To place ChemFoodChem fairly, it helps to map the territory it entered. Food chemistry authors have traditionally chosen among general chemistry journals, where a food application must compete with fundamental work from every subfield; dedicated food science and technology journals, where chemical papers sit alongside engineering, microbiology and product development and are sometimes read mainly for their application; nutrition journals, where chemical work is valued chiefly for a health endpoint; and analytical chemistry journals, where a food matrix is one sample type among many. Each home distorts the audience in a different way. A method for detecting adulteration in olive oil, a mechanistic study of lipid oxidation in an emulsion, and a chemical account of how a fermentation reshapes flavour may be three aspects of one research programme, yet the older landscape sends them to three different readerships. ChemFoodChem's founding proposition is that those readerships should overlap, and that a referee pool drawn from across them will judge each paper by the standard its own question deserves while exposing it to neighbours who can use it.

That proposition also explains the journal's cover culture, visible from its first volumes. Wiley's Chemistry Europe titles use cover artwork to carry a research story to readers beyond the article's specialists, and ChemFoodChem has followed the pattern from the start, with covers built around vanilla and vanillin, around a floating light reactor growing a pigment-producing cyanobacterium, and around wine analysis. For a field whose subjects are tasted, smelled and seen, visual communication is not decoration; it is how a molecular paper announces itself to sensory scientists, producers and students. Authors who value that kind of visibility, and who prepare clear graphical abstracts and honest, striking images, will find the journal's presentation system working in their favour, in a way that a text-only archive cannot reproduce.

Practical guidance for a first submission

A first submission should begin on the journal's Wiley author pages, which carry the current guidelines for manuscript preparation, article types, data and supporting information, referencing, and the open access licence and charge process that follows acceptance. Prepare the manuscript as a self-contained chemical argument: define the food system precisely, report provenance and preparation of samples, validate analytical methods on the real matrix rather than in solvent alone, treat statistics and replication with the seriousness analytical referees will expect, and place supporting information where specialists can audit spectra, chromatograms and calibrations. Where the work touches safety or health, keep claims at the level the chemistry supports; a radical-scavenging assay is not a clinical outcome, and editors in this field are alert to that distinction. Declare funding, conflicts and any industry relationship openly, since food research frequently involves producers and ingredient suppliers whose involvement is legitimate but must be visible. Finally, suggest the interdisciplinary reading of the paper in the cover letter — which neighbouring community, in sensory science, nutrition, analytics or production, should notice this work, and why — because helping editors see that cross-reading is, for this particular journal, part of the manuscript's case.

Sources used for this profile: the ChemFoodChem homepage on the Chemistry Europe hub of Wiley Online Library (editorial leadership, ISSN, scope); the Wiley-VCH journal page for ChemFoodChem (ISSN, language, scope); ChemistryViews launch coverage and the EuChemS Food Chemistry Division announcement; the Swiss Chemical Society launch notice of 14 March 2025; and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology library catalogue record for the title (Volume 1, Issue 1, January 2025). Charges and indexing change for new journals and should be rechecked on the live author pages before submitting.