Robert Bartram interviewed Ray Shillito, Chair of ISO TC 34 SC 16, and Bert Popping of FOCOS, to discuss how the development of international standards can support the detection and prevention of economically motivated food adulteration.
Robert reminds the readers of the all-too-well known horse meat scandal of 2103 and asks how fraudsters could have gotten away with it for so long. Interestingly, several years ago, UK and German competent authorities had already developed testing methods for horse and donkey meat, yet, the fraudulent activity went unnoticed. One of the reasons is that there are too many parameters that need to be tested for a risk-based approach, and the tools for identifying horse meat had not been standardized and were only available to a small number of authorities and laboratories.
Clearly, in today’s world, where countless regulated contaminants and illegal adulterants could be present, it is difficult to cover all with existing strategies of testing. Current approaches analyse for one or several targets while hundreds could potentially be present. A targeted approach is therefore economically no longer viable in the long run. For this reason, several developers have started opting for so-called non-targeted analytical approaches. Such approaches are based on sample profiling of a food ingredient, instead of looking for specific targets. Such methods seek to identify, deviations from typical profiles. This is carried out by comparing the profile obtained for a sample against a database containing profiles of reference samples, authentic and non-authentic. Non-targeted analysis can be based on several different technologies with variable screening powers. Examples for such tools are infra-red (IR) scanner, which identify protein, sugar and fat compositions. These devices tend to be largely inexpensive, can be handheld but cannot detect all types of frauds. Other tools are Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometry (NMR), which require large equipment and come with a higher screening power than most IR devices. Lately, mass spectrometry has been used to generate profiles for certain products, like the authentication of Parmigiano Reggiano (known to most of us as parmesan cheese). These devices have a very high scanning power and the potential to detect even low-level adulteration of products. At the same time, the sheer mass of data is more difficult to process, but novel algorithms and faster processors will solve the problem. Since these non-targeted approaches seem to have become a general trend in food testing, the question is how to standardize such approaches. It will remain a challenge for any standardization body. In fact, some Standard Development Organizations (SDOs) have already taken on this new challenge and started to tackle the problem.
The good news is that such non-targeted screens will make it significantly more difficult for fraudsters to go unnoticed since not only a handful of potential adulterants is screened for but a deviation from a standard profile. Some food producers already wholeheartedly embraced this new and probabilistic approach, others remain more hesitant. Time will tell which of the groups is more frequently in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Read Roberts article on page 38 of the ISO Focus Magazine.
