45 Food & Beverage Analysis 5. What are the main drivers for food testing?


Tim: International and domestic regulations have been established to protect the safety and quality of food. These relate to the entire food chain and to both safety and consumer information issues relating to food. In addition, many organisations require testing to demonstrate compliance with requirements that are more closely associated with marketing than safety.


EU Regulation No 1169/2011 requires the vast majority of pre-packed foods to bear a nutrition declaration for the key parameters such as energy, sugars, saturates, carbohydrate, fat, protein and salt. The content of the mandatory nutrition declaration may be supplemented voluntarily with the amounts of mono-unsaturates, polyunsaturates, polyols, starch, fi bre, vitamins and minerals. The 14 groups of substances or products causing allergies or intolerances are listed in Annexe II of the Regulation.


As part of an initiative to build confi dence in the food supply chain, the Global Standard for Food Safety was fi rst published in 1998. It provides a framework to manage product safety, integrity, legality and quality, and the operational controls for these criteria in the food and food ingredient manufacturing, processing and packing industry.


The Food Safety Act 1990 provides the framework for all food legislation in the England, Wales and Scotland. The Act ensures that businesses do not include anything in food, remove anything from food or treat food in any way which means it would be damaging to the health of people eating it. Food must be of the nature, substance or quality which consumers would expect, and food must be labelled, advertised and presented in a way that is not false or misleading.


Food safety procedures are based on Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) principles, and this analysis usually necessitates testing of physical, chemical or microbiological factors.


7. What are the current trends in food analysis?


Tim: There are three major trends at the moment. Firstly, allergen analysis was almost non- existent as recently as ten years ago, but now forms a signifi cant part of our workload, and all of our labs now have this capability. Secondly, following the publication in 2014 of the Elliott review into the integrity and assurance of food supply networks, the volume of food authenticity tests has grown rapidly. Thirdly, toxicity testing is becoming more important as global warming upsets ecosystems; shifting seafood toxins for example, and increasing mycotoxin levels in previously cold grain growing regions of the world.


8. How important is Method development?


6. Which instruments are the workhorses and which instruments are required for specialist work?


Tim: The fascination that I have for food testing is driven in part by the diversity of instruments that are necessary to provide a comprehensive testing service. Innovations are constantly emerging to improve our capabilities, but some of our key technologies include:


• Desktop NMR – our latest instruments are compact, extremely robust, fast (12 MHz) and simple to operate. As a result, we are able, for example, to measure Total Fat in just 20 seconds.


• GC-FID and HPLC – the analysis of vitamins and food additives is now commonplace with these technologies.


• ICP-OES – ideal for the analysis of parameters such as Ca, Cu, Fe, K, Mg, Mn, Na, P, and Zn


• Ion Exchange Chromatography – ideal for anions, cations and polar substances. This is typically used for carbohydrate analysis in food.


• ICP-MS – routinely employed for Ca, Hg, As, Cr and Pb. Mercury is highly toxic and is a particular concern in fi sh such as tuna that are high in the food chain, as well as in some herbs and spices.


In addition to these analytical technologies we also employ specialist instruments such as:


• Triple Quad Mass Spectrometers for the measurement of pesticides, antibiotics and mycotoxins


• High Resolution GC-MS for Dioxins and PCBs


• Stable Isotope Analysis for geographic testing; to check the provenance of Sicilian lemons for example.


One of the company’s most specialised instruments is a Multi Collector ICP-MS, which is a hybrid mass spectrometer that combines the superior ionisation of an inductively coupled plasma source with the precise measurements of a magnetic sector multicollector mass spectrometer. Based in the ALS laboratory in Sweden, this instrument offers speciation of metals at trace levels in food, electronic, and environmental applications. It is even able to identify the production site for pharmaceutical products.


Tim: Text book methods are very basic, so they need to be adapted to suit the appropriate laboratory equipment, and incorporated into lab SOPs in suffi cient detail to make them easy to follow for technicians. For commercial laboratories, the major goals are to make tests faster, lower in cost, and with improved sensitivity, repeatability and reproducibility. We are therefore constantly seeking to develop new methods that can help achieve these goals whilst also responding to new testing requirements. This is only possible by building partnerships with customers, instrument manufacturers and academia, so, yes – method development is critically important for us.


9. Has Covid affected the food testing market?


Tim: Yes, the pandemic has affected the market in many different ways, but our laboratories have responded accordingly to ensure that we maintain the provision of our essential services. Obviously, the food supply chain has been subjected to a number of shocks which have resulted in greater risk of ingredient substitution and reduction of product quality. The food supply chain has therefore had to heighten vigilance and this has increased the demand for testing. We have also expanded our testing services to include SARS-COV2 using PCR for human samples and environmental swabs, through our specialist laboratory in Portugal.


10. Looking forward, how will things change in the food testing/analysis lab?


Tim: In common with the rest of industry, many traditional practices are being automated with the use of smart technology (Industry 4.0). Increasingly, machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and the internet of things (IoT) are being integrated with laboratory procedures and LIMS, to standardise many tasks and diagnose issues without the need for human intervention.


Analytical data is only valuable once it is in the hands of those that need it, so the integration of LIMS with online resources will mean that the food supply chain will be able to make faster, better informed decisions.


Automation helps to reduce the potential for error, enable 24/7 operation and increase both speed and throughput capacity. In the laboratory, automation is now expanding to include collaborative robotics, and force limited robots are able to improve safety. In time, machine learning will improve the processing of data and should help in the validation of results.


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