## 1 Introduction  
Fresh-cut products are a food preparation conditioned in such a way as to provide a whole series of services to the consumer (including cleaning, hulling, washing, cutting into units or subunits ready to use), while maintaining the characteristics of the freshness and authenticity of the fresh products [1]. However, they are not stable over time due to metabolic processes during the pre- and postharvest stages which cause a variable nutritional value, appearance, and taste [2]. Hence, to ensure consumer satisfaction, food quality, and safety, both the agricultural and food industries have introduced rapid and objective inspection systems throughout the entire product chain.  
Human inspection is obviously limited in terms of operator speed and subjectivity and the low amount of product investigated [2], while analytical chemical methods are destructive, time-consuming, labor intensive, often unrepresentative, and environmentally unsustainable [3, 4].  
Over the last two decades, the development of nondestructive sensing technologies for the automated quality evaluation and safety inspection of agricultural and food products has made substantial progress [3]. Although spectroscopy is considered a powerful tool in this context, it provides a punctual measurement method that is not able to analyze a heterogeneous bulk of samples with sufficient accuracy [3]. For this reason, industries are pointing toward methods that have the process advantages of spectroscopy techniques with the addition of spatial information. This approach, also defined as hyperspectralimaging (HSI), is nowadays widely applied in the food chain, becoming one of the key elements of process control within the new concept of Industry 4.0.  
The increasing number of scientific studies pointing toward a production process control in real-time have pushed to summarize HSI technical aspects and the analysis of the data from such devices to bring the laboratory to the field/production line. The need to have highly customizable tools available at different points in the production process has favored the need to review the literature by focusing on a product category that requires a high degree of quality control, i.e., fresh-cut fruits and vegetables. Therefore, the potential of using this technology along the entire production chain of fresh-cut products emerges, but the limits are also highlighted and represented. Moreover, a discussion on the new frontiers in the development of cost-effective, portable, and hand-held HSI devices, which could open new applicative research perspectives, is presented.  
The literature search was performed using the keywords \"hyperspectral imaging\", \"fruit and vegetables\", and \"quality\" and led to the identification of 4509 papers published between 2001 and 2023 (Scopus, 2023). Then, the search was narrowed using the keywords \"fresh-cut\", and \"postharvest\", and 104 publications between 2010 and 2023 were identified (Figure 1a--in orange). The same bibliographic search was also performed on the Web of Science platform, obtaining 115 papers published between 2004 and 2023 (Figure 1a--in blue). Both the literature and articles used in this review (Figure 1b) show a general increase in publications over time, particularly in recent years.