Food authenticity has kept many of us busy, no matter if you are working as a quality manager at a food producer, as a regulator or as a scientist in a food testing laboratory. The goals that everyone is thriving towards are (1) the minimization of opportunities for food fraud, and, if it happens, (2) to have the right analytical tools to detect it. And it is the second point that the AOAC Food Authenticity Task Force has addressed. The outcome was presented in a recent, free-of-charge webinar, courtesy of Separation Science.
Dr. Bert Popping, the advisor to the AOAC Task Force, introduced the topic by describing the challenges faced by analysts. A key challenge is the difficulty to test for all possible known adulterants of most commodities using targeted testing for a single or a small group of compounds.
Therefore, scientists had resorted to a novel type of methods, called non-targeted or un-targeted methods. These methods are profiling methods that assess deviations from a standard profile of a product. Technologies that can be used for this include infrared spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. The number of publications on this subject has risen almost exponentially over the past year. This year (2020), more than 2000 manuscripts are expected to be published.
How would scientist choose those that are fit-for-purpose among the more than 10.000 methods that have been published until now? This is the challenge the AOAC Food Authenticity Task Force addressed.
Standard Method Performance Requirements (SMPR®) for targeted and non-targeted methods have been developed by the Task Force experts. SMPR® set minimum method performance criteria that methods for food authenticity need to fulfill. To achieve this, two subgroups were formed: the targeted methods working group led by Joe Boison, and the non-targeted methods working group by John Szpylka. After numerous discussions, both groups agreed on SMPRs for three commodities: milk, honey and olive oil. Both chairs, Joe and John, reported about the progress their working groups have made in the webinar. The non-targeted working group even ventured onto unchartered territory as no performance criteria for non-targeted methods had been set previously. Palmer Orlandi, Chief Scientific Officer at AOAC, summarized the findings at the end of the webinar and provided an outlook.
By now, the SMPRs developed by the two working groups have been voted on and have been accepted. The Food Authenticity task force will continue its work, assessing different matrices and methods.
If you are interested in watching the recorded webinar, you can follow this link.
