The conference covered food fraud, food contaminants and residues, food contact materials, food allergens and – especially after the incident in the Spize restaurant – pathogens.
Food Fraud & Food Integrity
Policy-level issues were addressed by Saskia van Ruth and Paul Brereton, analytical issues were addressed by Guantao Zhang, Mikko Hofsommer, Steve Holroyd, Connor Black, Gerhard Rimkus.
Saskia van Ruth, Wageningen University, highlighted the three components of food fraud vulnerability: Opportunities, Motivations and Controls. She shared with the audience that more than 80% of the fraudsters are male, and the most frequently adulterated group are spices and herbs. Her adulteration online quiz was won by Kate Mastovska from Eurofins.
Paul Brereton, Queen’s University Belfast, shared the latest developments to ensure integrity in the food supply chain. He explained the need to prevent incidents before they happened and the data sources that can be used and combined to predict possible incidents.
Guangtao Zhang from the Mars Food Safety Center in Beijing explained how Mars is dealing with the risk of adulteration and highlighted the example or rice, where modern, handheld NIR and FT-IT detectors are used to screen every incoming material. He shared with the audience that every measurement is gathered in a database which predictive power grows with every new measurement. He emphasized the need for non-target screening methods to increase the probability of discovering food fraud with new adulterants.
Steve Holroyd from Fonterra explained, along the same lines, how they deploy non-target methods for milk adulteration detection. He quoted Prof. Engelsen: “When you want to detect food fraud and adulteration, you are not looking for a single substance. You have to look broadly.” He mentioned the USP guidance document for non-targeted methods to which he made a significant contribution.
Connor Black from Queen’s University Belfast explained how ambient technologies like REIMS can help identify fraud in meat and fish by identifying species within seconds.
Gerhard Rimkus from Intertek used the example of honey to highlight which substances can be used to adulterate honey and how they can be detected. He showed examples of online shops selling isotope-adjusted adulterants which come with certificates stating which analytical tests for honey adulteration they would pass. The takeaway here was that as adulteration-testing gets more sophisticated, adulterers get more sophisticated.
And last but not least in this section, Mikko Hofsommer from GfL in Berlin showed which tricks fraudsters use to adulterate fruit juices. While adulteration of most fruits with cane sugar is easily detectable, pineapple presents a problem. Mikko highlighted the approaches to still detect adulteration of pineapple juice.
Food Contaminants & Packaging Materials
Katerina Mastovska of Eurofins reported about the activities of AOAC in the area of pesticide residues. She highlighted the new First Action Pathway and the establishment of SMPR through an expert group.
Amadeo Fernandez-Alba from the European reference Laboratory for Pesticides in Almeria, Spain explained the pro’s and con’s using different method approaches. In his educational, yet entertaining presentation, he used the analogy of Eskimos fishing for one or many fish at the same time to explain the trade-off of wide-range screen vs sensitivity.
Emma Bradley of FERA explained that challenges of testing the safety of food contact materials, especially when using simulants.
Quentin Baslé of Nestlé provided an update over the Nestlé-developed method to detect 3-MCPD, 2-MCPD and glycidyl esters in infant formula and the progress of their method in AOAC. He reported that 19 infant formulas (4 liquid, 15 powders) were used to validate their method successfully. He highlighted their finding that ASE is not suitable for extraction from all types of infant formula.
Food Allergens & Pathogens
Bert Popping of FOCOS explained the benefits and challenges of the different methods available to analysts, including ELISA, LFD, PCR and mass spectrometry. He highlighted that using a DNA-based technique for the detection of a protein concentrate may not be the most sensitive method. He placed the different methods in the context of developments in the different Codex Alimentarius working groups and the work currently performed by European Commission and some national authorities, and the impact this will have on the food manufacturing industry,
François Bourdichon, Chair of the Standing Committee on Microbiological Hygiene of the International Dairy Federation gave, especially after the incident of the Spize Restaurant in Singapore, a very timely talk about pathogens and method validation. François highlighted that the verification of a method for pathogens (or any other analyte) in one laboratory of a group network does not mean the method is verified for all group laboratories. Each laboratory needs to demonstrate proficiency in performing the method.
Wei Zhu of Danone gave a very interesting talk, highlighting what Danone expects from the food testing laboratories in terms of how they choose and verify their methods. Danone groups the methods into four categories, requiring different aspects to be addressed by the laboratory, including specificity, bias, linearity range and robustness. Wei highlighted that one of the current challenges is to compare GB methods with what is available as international standards.
Method and Material Optimizations
With the ever-increasing workload and sensitivity requirements of laboratory staff, method and material optimization is vital. We heard some excellent presentations, highlighting the latest improvements.
Wiebke Kaziur from University Duisburg-Essen, Jane Tan Yi Lin from Waters and Klaus Buckedahl from Sigma Aldrich highlighted the latest developments for SPME since its invention by Janusz Pawlizin.
Sandhya Nargund of Shimadzu, Yu-Hong Chen of Agilent, Jianru Stahl-Zeng of SCIEX, Tran Nham of AnalytikJena, Chirarina Mapa of Phenomenex, Irmgard Reichstein of Axel Semrau, Shalene Goh of Gerstel, John Lee of Agilent, Jaran Jainhuknan of Bruker and Takeshi Kawamoto of JAIMA highlighted the latest method a material improvements, remedying issues with backpressure of columns, retention times, optimizing sensitivity of equipment. One direct benefit of several of these developments is the wide-range screening for more pesticides at very low levels in a single run.
What was clearly noticeable that the quality of talks of the vendors was very high and provided a significant amount of useful information to the attendees, which were composed of food authorities, private laboratories, and food manufacturers.
At this point, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the speakers for contributing to this event and sharing their knowledge, to the sponsors and organisers (Separation Science), without whom this event would have not been possible, and also the very engaged audience! A special ‘thank you’ goes to Shimadzu for sponsoring the poster awards.
