Virgin and extra virgin olive oils are sometimes adulterated with cheaper vegetable oils and lower-grade olive oils due to the high demand and price of high-grade olive oil. Not only is it important to authenticate olive oil to prevent fraud, it is also necessary to determine purity for the health and safety of consumers.

Read this case study to discover a simple way to tackle the adulteration of extra virgin olive oil. You’ll learn:

• Why there is research on olive oil adulteration;
• The mission of the first center in North America dedicated to olive oil research;
• How to authenticate olive oil quicker and easier; and
• The future of olive oil production.

Download this resource today!

The post Fighting Food Fraud: A Unique Approach to Tackle Extra Virgin Olive Oil Adulteration appeared first on Food Quality & Safety.

FDA has released data from a sampling assignment carried out in 2021 and 2022 to test imported honey for economically motivated adulteration (EMA). EMA can occurs when someone intentionally leaves out, takes out, or substitutes a valuable ingredient or part of a food or when a substance is added to a food to make it appear better or of greater value.

The FDA’s sampling was designed to identify products that contained less expensive undeclared added sweeteners in honey, such as syrups from cane and corn. The agency collected and tested 144 samples of imported honey from bulk and retail shipments from 32 countries and found 14 samples (10%) to be violative. The agency refused entry of violative shipments into the U.S. and placed the associated company and product on an import alert.

FDA routinely assesses imported honey products to ensure accurate product labeling and otherwise help keep consumers from being deceived. The agency will continue to test honey for EMA under the agency’s import sampling and risk-based import entry screening program. Violative samples are subject to agency action, such as recall and import refusal. When appropriate, the agency may consider pursuing criminal investigations. FDA also collaborates with international counterparts to detect and combat EMA related to imported products, including honey.

The post FDA Releases Data on Adulteration in Imported Honey appeared first on Food Quality & Safety.

Food fraud is nothing new. It has been a problem for many years and remains essentially unsolved. It is recognized as one of four different challenges to food integrity and is almost always motivated by economic gain. The European Commission defines food fraud as “any suspected intentional action by businesses or individuals for the purpose of deceiving purchasers and gaining undue advantage therefrom.”

The other three challenges are:

• Food defense, which is primarily aimed at preventing intentional harm and may even occur when disgruntled employees sabotage food products;
• Food quality, which usually results from unintentional actions but may involve food fraud; and
• Food safety, which is mostly unintentional, with causes such as contamination and failure to control critical processes, but can also be malicious or fraudulent.

The phrase “food fraud” covers a variety of different types of fraud, among which are dilution, substitution, unapproved enhancement, concealment, counterfeit, mislabeling, and gray market. It is continually an issue because of the increasing length and complexity of supply chains. Moreover, supplier vulnerabilities are driven by the need to shift from one supply chain to another. Aside from the economic impacts of food fraud, there is always an inherent safety risk when ingredients are substituted, whether intentional or not. Traceability is lost, increasing the chances of additional undetected substitutions.

An example of an unintentional action with a big impact is the melamine scandal in China in 2008. This started as a food fraud case when someone used melamine, a non-food nitrogen source that was misidentified as “protein” by substituting routine total nitrogen testing methods for testing that would have indicated digestible nitrogen in baby and pet foods. This resulted in fatalities and hospitalizations, followed by the establishment of new regulations to address the potential for economically motivated fraud that results in a food safety hazard. There have been other cases over the years of fake ingredients being used in many products driven by people who basically don’t know what they’re doing.

A Growing Global Problem

Each month, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission publishes a summary of food fraud and adulteration cases brought to its attention. This summary is by no means an exhaustive list, comprising only the cases reported in press articles around the globe.

The March 2022 monthly summary of articles on food fraud and adulteration had instances from 22 countries, including four countries inside the EU and the U.K. The size of some is quite staggering. One from China involved a criminal network smuggling more than 180,000 tons of seafood. Another resulted in the closing of a factory in Cameroon that was producing fake honey by mixing water, powdered sugar, and other ingredients.

While these examples represent significant economic fraud, others such as ingredient substitutions that introduce unlabeled allergens pose a huge risk to those with food allergies.

Food fraud is clearly a significant threat to food safety, impacting consumer health, industry operations, and brand reputation. Preventing food fraud is critical, but understanding and identifying the risky hot spots is not that easy. Sound food safety systems will always be an essential foundation, and developing these is a key challenge if food fraud is to be defeated. Current mitigation measures based on sampling and testing are useful in the short term but do not necessarily solve the problem. Detecting food fraud does not prevent it; it just postpones the issue until the fraudster has found another means of avoiding detection.

As mentioned, food fraud is very often a criminal activity driven by economic gain. The high value of the ingredient or material in saffron, honey, or beef, for example, is one motivator. Substituting or adulterating a high value item with something of a lesser value creates more profit. But even some traditionally lower-value items can make a profit for food criminals because of climate or disease impacting crop yields, such as hot weather affecting olive oil harvests, driving up the price of virgin olive oil. This makes adulteration or mislabeling even more appealing. Geopolitical tensions, such as the impact of war on availability of ingredients in the supply chain, create similar pressures.

The latter point is particularly relevant today, given the situation in Ukraine. Both Ukraine and Russia are major grain exporters. In 2019, the combined export of these two countries provided more than a quarter of the world’s wheat. Despite sanctions, Russia will likely be able to export a considerable quantity, but the harvest in Ukraine will inevitably be impacted, and its seaports are effectively rendered unusable.

According to the UN’s FAO Food Price Monitoring and Analysis, world wheat prices soared by 19.7% during March 2022. Maize prices posted a 19.1% month-on-month increase, hitting a record high along with those of barley and sorghum. Vegetable oils (Ukraine is a major producer) also rocketed in price, and a world shortage is predicted. We are already seeing a shortage in the stores and “rationing” by some retailers. Sunflower oil is also a major ingredient in processed food, so the risks of fraud among these items are already on the horizon.

Supply Chain Vulnerability

Longer and more complex supply chains create more opportunities for food fraudsters to infiltrate. The more often a material is transferred from one operator to the next, the more chances criminals have to make a profit. Multi-ingredient processed products, with components sourced from many regions or countries, have increased supply chain length and complexity. Ingredients may pass through many buyers and sellers from farm to fork and be transported as bulk ingredients or smaller units by road, rail, or air in frozen, concentrated, or dried forms for reconstitution at later stage. All these steps invite the opportunity for fraudsters to make money.

In the past, when the food industry was made up of mainly smaller organizations and individuals, food fraud would have been perpetrated by the organizations themselves; however, it is clear that, as the scale of food production has increased, criminal organizations have become involved.

The horsemeat scandal of 2013, when horse DNA was discovered in products mainly sold as beef, was a shock to the industry. It became clear to the industry and the general public that there was money to be made in food, and if there was money to be made, criminals would be active. Generally, these criminals have no desire to make customers ill or worse. This would only call attention to their activities. But, when monetary gain is the driving factor, there will be times when greed overrides safety concerns, especially if the consequences of food adulterations are not fully understood.

Europol became involved in coordinating investigations among national authorities, raiding premises and making arrests. Following an independent review, national Food Crime Units were created, and the industry started to take the risks seriously. Food safety standards used by the various bodies and organizations involved in certifying food safety management systems were reviewed to include risk assessments linked to food fraud, in addition to those linked to food safety, using a similar methodology to hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP).

A New Way of Fighting Food Fraud

Essentially, the new method involves testing and there is a risk assessment process. There is a place for testing, but obviously there are downsides. For example, are you testing for the right thing? Do you wait for the result before you use that ingredient? Can you trust the testing and are the methods to test available? Are the analysis certificates fraudulent or counterfeit? It is all about using a risk assessment approach to try to identify where those risks are and to effectively manage them. Although similar to HACCP, but it’s called vulnerability assessment critical control points (VACCP).

Many of the leading global standard organizations now include VACCP as part of the auditing process for food safety systems; others require a food safety plan that includes an ingredient hazard assessment to address known cases of fraud that pose a food safety threat, as well as the more common food safety hazards. This will mean a control plan incorporating mitigation strategies and corrective procedures, which could involve audits of the entire supply chain, supplier assessment, and extensive quality control checks of ingredients and processes.

The secret of any successful food safety plan is setting up a team that is familiar with what is happening in the industry—a team that can consider every part of the process and identify vulnerable points in the supply chain, determine where the risk factors are, and decide how best to control them. It is not possible to completely eliminate the risks, but what organizations should be trying to do is control all that have been identified in order to minimize food fraud.

Steps to Minimize the Risks

A typical food fraud management system would begin with creating the team needed to operate the system, after which all the materials or groups of materials would need to be listed and studied. This would allow identification of potential fraud issues, fraud issues that pose a food safety risk, and evaluation of the degree of risk under current procedures. The next step would be to evaluate any need for further controls or processes and thereafter record and implement all additional measures. The final step is common to all successful management systems: regularly reviewing and verifying activity and resolving any non-conformities and carefully documenting the outcomes.

Organizations need to adopt a unique management system for several reasons:

• There is no single, prescribed method of conducting a vulnerability assessment; any structured approach to identifying the risks can be used.
• The choice of methodology may therefore be a matter of personal preference, of company policy, or of the complexity of the situation.
• The vulnerability assessment is a specialized form of risk assessment, and it is therefore logical to consider similar tools and methods.
• Some organizations have found tools such as threat assessment and critical control points (TACCP) and VACCP useful.

Knowledge of the supply chain, mapping, and monitoring are the key items needed for developing a consistent strategy to prevent food fraud, together with adequate auditing programs focusing not only on food safety and quality but extending their scope to counter fraud elements including traceability. The traceability element is also important because it is part of standards like ISO 22000:2005. This enables companies to test the vulnerability of their chain and check on their ­robustness.

McCarthy is the global food and beverage manager for DNV Business Assurance, a UK-based food certification body. Reach her at amanda.mccarthy@dnv.com.

The post Food Fraud: A Global Perspective appeared first on Food Quality & Safety.

Food fraud is a significant concern for both consumers and producers. The scale of the problem is significant: 2016 research by Fera Science indicates that fraud accounts for up to 25% of all globally reported food safety incidents. Additionally, growing public demand for food authenticity means that consumers regularly pay a premium price for organic and sustainably produced goods, which is why unprincipled producers and distributors are flooding markets with adulterated, low quality, or mislabeled foodstuffs. This is not only damaging the livelihoods of legitimate businesses, but it’s also risking the health of consumers.

To make matters worse, the potential number of adulterants and the millions of different foodstuffs require a similarly wide range of test methods if food fraud is to be effectively detected and prevented. The rapid growth of global e-commerce also increasingly places food sales outside of regulatory oversight. To catch the food fraudsters, you first need to quickly and efficiently identify their handiwork, which requires special tools.

Assessing Food Authenticity

Analytical testing is an essential technology for assessing food authenticity, which is critical to protect the health of consumers, the food brand, and producer income. Testing is, therefore, a necessary part of an overall strategy to mitigate fraud risk. The techniques and reference databases used for authenticity testing are rapidly evolving, but more still needs to be done, not least in terms of consistency.

There is a lack of adequate testing and test uniformity across the globe. Additionally, many of the test methods reported in the literature either lack applicability to emerging frauds or are simply not deployed in an enforcement framework; however, in recent years, pressure has grown to improve traceability and accountability across the global supply chain, especially for the more commonly adulterated products.

Natural Sweeteners

Current demand for natural sweeteners is high. When consumers purchase a product, they want to be able to recognize the listed ingredients, and know that those ingredients are as natural as possible. This is one of the reasons for increased interest in honey, which has been a natural sweetener for thousands of years. Consumers want more of these natural sweeteners, so the production and sales of honey, particularly organic honey, are experiencing a hefty growth. We’re also seeing that consumers want natural product organic honey, called monofloral honey or unifloral honey, which is basically a honey that comes primarily from a specific type of flower. Consumers are willing to pay more for these products; therefore, we need to protect these consumers by making sure they get what they are paying for.

Creating a Buzz around Honey

One of the most widely adulterated products is the organic variety of honey, a high-value item prized for its unique properties. According to the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention Food Fraud Database, it’s the third most targeted food for adulteration, after milk and olive oil. It’s also financially significant; a report by Grand View Research valued the global honey market at USD $9.21 billion in 2020 and expects it grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.2%.

According to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, China, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, and the United States are among the major honey-producing countries, accounting for approximately 55% of world production. The most common form of adulteration involves extending or diluting honey with other, less expensive sweeteners, such as corn, cane, and beet syrups. Any form of ingredient addition or substitution that creates a food safety hazard, such as the addition of an unlabeled allergen, must be addressed in the food safety plan.

Therefore, the ability to identify these substances quickly, efficiently, and consistently is essential to tackle fraudulent practices. What the food industry needs is analytical instruments and techniques that can consistently and rapidly fingerprint food and identify trace chemicals.

Setting the Standard

The good news is that liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC-MS) has emerged as the gold standard for analyzing trace constituents in food. The process enables food safety experts to map food components in an unprecedented fashion and will revolutionize how we manage and regulate the quality, safety, and authenticity of food.

While there has been work on developing ways to fingerprint foodstuffs, including honey, approaches among laboratories have varied in terms of sample preparation and analytical methods. There are also differences in terms of data processing. As a result, two laboratories analyzing the same sample could obtain slightly different results. To prevent the problems that may result from these variances, we should be looking at a standardized approach to fingerprinting and analysis.

Refining the Approach

Of course, we are trying to address two issues here: food safety and the quality and authenticity of the product. Each area is governed by separate sets of regulations. If we look at residues of contaminants in honey, such as pesticides, there also are differences between locations. For example, countries can have their own set of restrictions for the maximum limit for specific compounds. When we think about fingerprinting for honey, contaminants are a part of the picture, but the permitted levels vary between countries.

Food authenticity testing utilizing chemical fingerprinting strategies is emerging as a practical approach to tracking food fraud, as chemical fingerprints are virtually impossible to imitate due to their complexity. Regarded as the next-generation surveillance approach for chemicals in food, non-targeted analysis using high-resolution mass spectrometry coupled with innovative software enables the rapid characterization of thousands of chemicals in complex food matrices such as honey.

Currently, samples come from the field to the lab for testing; however, there is interest in potentially reversing this by bringing the lab out into the field. This interesting, but not yet recognized, capability would enable regulators and the food industry to rapidly respond more quickly to honey contamination—and to food fraud in general. By deploying the results of recent fingerprinting research in this way, we will be better equipped to protect consumers and producers alike.

A Global Perspective

The increasing globalization of our food supply chain raises the opportunity for food fraud. Experts predict that testing using methods such as those described above, will become more accessible, increasingly automated, and easier to perform. Fingerprinting methods—in which the entire molecular profile of a food can be obtained—will be a major feature of fraud prevention and identification systems in the future.

The good news is that current testing requirements have led to a rise in rapid, broad-coverage testing methods and technology to enable remote testing of food, in addition to improved testing within laboratory settings. Food testing laboratories can confidently measure contaminants that threaten the global food chain and supply and identify food fraud using these new approaches.

Dr. Bayen is an associate professor in the department of food science and agricultural chemistry at McGill University in Quebec, Canada. He is a recipient of an Agilent Thought Leader Award. Reach him at stephane.bayen@mcgill.ca.

The post How to Ensure Honey Purity through Mass Spectrometry appeared first on Food Quality & Safety.

Honey is a natural food product loved by the global population. However, its limited production, relatively high price, and complex composition make it vulnerable to adulteration. In fact, it ranks in the top 10 most adulterated food products worldwide.

Honey adulteration is a form of food fraud, which is the deliberate and intentional substitution, addition, tampering, or misrepresentation of food, and it’s a major trend impacting the honey industry today.

Wiley has partnered with Agilent Technologies to bring together a special collection of articles detailing the advanced technologies available to detect adulteration and determine the authenticity of honey products. This important compendium features content from Agilent Technologies and Wiley publications, including Food Quality & Safety. In this collection, you’ll read about:

• Detection and estimation of rice syrup in honey;
• Food authenticity testing best practices;
• Preventive measures you can take against food fraud;
• Major honey authentication issues, such as production and origin; and
• Pollen composition, physicochemical parameters, and phenolic and mineral contents of honey samples from Portugal.

We think this series of essential articles will help you combat food fraud in your operations and ensure that your customers are getting a quality product.

Discover this important compendium of content from Agilent Technologies, Food Quality & Safety and Wiley publications. Download the application note to learn more, courtesy of Agilent.

• Application note: Detection and estimation of special marker for rice syrup (SMR) in honey
• Fire up your next food authenticity project
• Food fraud: A criminal activity. Implementing preventative measures that increase difficulty in carrying out the crime
• A comprehensive review on the main honey authentication issues: Production and origin
• Authentication of honeys from Caramulo region (Portugal): Pollen spectrum, physicochemical characteristics, mineral content, and phenolic profile

Download this whitepaper today!

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Strawberries from Switzerland or olive oil from Italy can be sold at much higher prices than the same products from other countries, and the food industry spends a great deal of time fighting false declarations of geographical origin that are assumed to cause an estimated $30 million to $40 billion a year in economic damage.

One method for detecting food fraud is to determine the delta-O-18 value of a product sample, which characterizes the oxygen isotope ratio. This procedure is generally highly time consuming and costly. A case of suspected fraud involves not only collecting reference data from the claimed country of origin, but also comparative data from other regions to validate or disprove the product’s origin.

Florian Cueni, PhD, a botanist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, has, in collaboration with Agroisolab GmbH, a company specializing in isotope analysis, has developed a model intended for use in simulating the oxygen isotope ratio in plants from individual regions, thereby eliminating the need for the time-consuming collection of reference data. The model is based on temperature, precipitation, and humidity data and information about the growing season of a plant, all of which are available from publicly accessible databases, according to a new study published in Nature Scientific Reports.

Dr. Cueni tested and validated the model on a unique delta-O-18 reference dataset for strawberries collected across Europe over the span of 11 years. The case study has shown that the model can simulate the origin of the strawberries with a high degree of accuracy.

“With minor adjustments to the parameters, our model can be used to determine all plant products,” says Ansgar Kahmen, PhD, a researcher in the department of environmental sciences and botany, at the University of Basel, who led the project, adding that the model makes it possible to simplify and speed up conventional isotope analysis by accurately simulating the regions of origin of agricultural foodstuffs.

The post Food Fraud: New Method Cuts Costs and Time in Detecting Fraud appeared first on Food Quality & Safety.

Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin have reported in a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that a handheld device can be used to identify common types of meat and fish within 15 seconds, which could assist in detection of food fraud.

Although current molecular techniques, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), are highly accurate, these analyses can take hours to days, and are often performed at off-site labs. Previous studies have devised more direct and on-site food analysis methods with mass spectrometry, using the amounts of molecular components to verify meat sources, but they also destroyed samples during the process or required sample preparation steps. The new device, called the MasSpec Pen, extracts compounds from a material’s surface within seconds and then analyzes them on a mass spectrometer. The investigators wanted to determine whether this device could rapidly and effectively detect meat and fish fraud in pure filets and ground products.

The researchers used the pen to examine the molecular composition of grain-fed and grass-fed beef, chicken, pork, lamb, venison, and five common fish species collected from grocery stores. Once the device’s tip was pressed against a sample, a 20-μL droplet of solvent was released, extracting sufficient amounts of molecules within three seconds for analysis by mass spectrometry.

The researchers report that the process took 15 seconds, required no preprocessing, and the liquid extraction did not harm the samples’ surfaces. The team developed authentication models using the unique patterns of the molecules identified, including carnosine, anserine, succinic acid, xanthine, and taurine, to distinguish pure meat types from each other. They then applied their models to the analysis of test sets of meats and fish. For these samples, all models had a 100% accuracy identifying the protein source, which is as good as the current method of PCR.

The researchers say they plan to expand the method to other meat products and integrate the device into a portable mass spectrometer for on-site meat authentication.

The post Researchers Detail New Detection Method for Meat and Fish Fraud appeared first on Food Quality & Safety.

Food adulteration, whether intentional or accidental, poses a risk to consumer health and defames food manufacturers. In addition to maintaining best manufacturing practices, it is crucial for food scientists to develop reliable methods to test food quality, detect traces of unauthorized adulterants, and remain compliant with regulatory requirements. For a variety of food products, carbohydrate components serve as authenticity markers and are often used to validate food quality.

Despite their widespread use, analytical techniques such as liquid chromatography (LC) or gas chromatography (GC) often present challenges when it comes to obtaining accurate carbohydrate measurements, compromising important information at the expense of public health. Here, we explain why it’s necessary to choose sensitive and robust methods for carbohydrate analysis within the food industry. We also discuss how using high-performance anion-exchange chromatography coupled with pulsed amperometric detection (HPAE-PAD) can identify food adulterants with increased confidence.

Carbohydrate Detection: The Need for Sensitive and Robust Methods

Carbohydrate profiles in certain foods, such as honey, agave syrups, fruit juices, and coffee, act as markers for authenticity and can be used to detect food fraud. Adulteration of honey or agave syrup can involve their dilution with cheaper, often unhealthy alternatives, such as high fructose corn syrup or saccharose syrup, produced from beets or canes. In these instances, analytical methods that can accurately measure sucrose levels in honey or perform oligosaccharide profiling in agave syrup help distinguish the genuine food products from their fraudulent counterparts.

The familiarity and widespread use of LC and GC prompt scientists to use these techniques as a default approach for carbohydrate analysis; however, these methods aren’t the best choice to detect, measure, and study carbohydrates. The high polarity of carbohydrates makes them difficult to reliably retain and separate using reverse phase chromatography. As carbohydrates are weakly acidic, dissolving high concentrations of them imparts higher acidity to the samples. At extreme pH levels, metals from the column’s surface strip away and adhere to the packing materials, tampering with the column’s integrity. Moreover, the inherent viscosity of these samples will also require optimized column heating to ensure a consistent flow through the column. Any fluctuations to lower temperatures can result in changes in viscosity of the sugar samples, causing them to stick to the column surface, generating backpressure and making the method irreproducible.

Additionally, carbohydrates tend to have very few chromophore groups and cannot, therefore, be detected with adequate sensitivity using ultraviolet (UV)-based detectors. Switching to refractive index or low-wavelength UV detection methods prevents the use of gradients due to their sensitivity to the eluent and sample matrix components. Gradients can also increase the baseline noise, thereby reducing the signal-to-noise ratio and decreasing the sensitivity of measurements.

Relying on discrete elution times is also challenging as the monosaccharide components, glucose and fructose, both have the same molecular weights of 180.16 g/mol. When in solution, they also both exist in ring forms, making them indistinguishable, especially given the lack of chromophores. Using a strong base can push the equilibrium to one side and stop the interconversion between ring and chain structures, providing a slight difference in retention time. However, at higher base concentrations, the monosaccharides are not retained for too long and will elute out very quickly.

One option to retain carbohydrates and boost sensitivity for measurement is to derivatize the samples. Though several isomers and chains of a carbohydrate molecule can be derivatized, requiring a summation to yield the total result for one carbohydrate can make method validation complicated, laborious, and time-consuming. Furthermore, due to the diversity of sample matrices used in the food industry, a thorough sample cleanup prior to injection is often necessary to prevent any assay carryovers, making the sample preparation process more tedious.

HPAE, on the other hand, is a chromatographic technique better suited to separate, detect, and measure carbohydrates as food authenticity markers. It takes advantage of the weakly acidic nature of carbohydrates for highly selective separations at high pH using strong anion exchange stationary phases. At higher pH, carbohydrates are partially ionized and can, therefore, be separated by anion exchange mechanisms.

Coupling HPAE with PAD allows direct quantification of nonderivatized carbohydrates at even low-picomole levels with minimal sample preparation and cleanup. The direct form of analysis precludes any biased selectivity toward certain carbohydrate structures, as may be seen in other analytical methods measuring derivatized sugars. This simplifies method validation and brings much-needed reproducibility to these techniques, enabling intra- and inter-batch testing for quality control.

There are two key reasons why HPAE-PAD is more selective and specific for carbohydrate analysis compared to LC or GC approaches. First, the specific detection voltages used in the pulsed amperometry ensure that it only measures analytes that are oxidizable at those particular voltages. In the case of carbohydrate analysis, the settings provide a sensitivity that is several orders of magnitude greater than other classes of analytes. Second, due to the anion exchange separation, neutral or cationic sample components that may be oxidizable at the same voltages elute into or closer to the void volume of the column, thereby removing any analyte that may otherwise interfere with the carbohydrate analysis.

Food Safety Testing with HPAE-PAD

When it comes to food safety, the data obtained are only as good as the method used. HPAE-PAD methods are commonly used to detect and quantify unauthorized additives in food products that have carbohydrates as their quality markers. Additionally, the method is regularly used to characterize the carbohydrate components present in the food sample to gain deeper insights into their composition, serving as another testing parameter for future measurements. Below, we have listed how HPAE-PAD can be used to perform safety testing and combat food fraud in popular food items.

Honey. Composed of several sugars based on its floral source, honey is tested for adulteration using sucrose as its quality indicator. Adding cheap sweeteners, such as cane sugar or refined beet sugar, can artificially increase the levels of sucrose in honey. The Codex Alimentarius Committee on Sugars has, therefore, specified the maximum value of sucrose as 5 g in 100 g of honey. Carbohydrate analysis with HPAE-PAD can be used to measure these parameters as well as determine the floral origins of honey, using a few minor sugars as a “fingerprint.” Using the Thermo Scientific Dionex CarboPac PA210-4μm column in an HPAE-PAD protocol allows for the separation of 15 sugars in honey with minimal sample preparation, 80-120% precision and accuracy, and a detection limit of as low as 10% adulteration with added syrups.

Agave syrup. Another food product that has recently become a target for food fraud due to its growing popularity is agave syrup. An alternative to traditional sweeteners, such as table sugar and honey, agave syrup has a low glycemic index, causing a slower rise in blood glucose and insulin levels. As most of its sugars are in fructose form with very little glucose, adulteration with high fructose corn syrup is common. The main producer of agave, Mexico, has recently created a governmentally approved guideline for the characterization of pure agave syrup. In the method prescribed by the Norma Oficial Mexicana, HPAE-PAD is used to determine levels of the main sugars (fructose, glucose, and sucrose), polyols (sorbitol, mannitol), and 5-hydroxymethyfural. After the agave syrup is diluted with water, the carbohydrate profiles are analyzed before and after enzymatic hydrolysis with amyloglucosidase and fructanase to measure the content of sugars as well as fructan.

Fruit juices. The billion-dollar fruit juice industry often encounters dilution and blending with inexpensive and synthetic sweeteners, a ploy designed to achieve higher margins and larger economic gains. A common adulterant known as medium invert sugar, in which one half of the sucrose has been hydrolyzed to glucose and fructose, closely matches the composition ratio of approximately 1:1:2 (glucose: fructose: sucrose) found in orange juice. When cane sugar is the source of the invert sugar, stable isotope ratio analysis (SIRA) can be used to detect adulteration due to the differing ratios of 13C:12C in orange juice and cane sugar; however, if beets are used to produce the invert sugar, the 13C:12C ratio between orange juice and beet sugar do not differ much as the sugars are produced using similar metabolic pathways. In this case, SIRA can no longer detect adulteration by beet sugar, providing a convenient loophole in food fraud.

Scientists have resorted to HPAE-PAD to characterize beet invert sugar and discover several sugar components that are not present in orange juice. One such sugar not found in pure orange juice is raffinose, a trisaccharide of D-glucose, D-fructose, and D-galactose, which has been used as an adulteration marker for orange juice. Additionally, the signature pattern of late-eluting components appearing at about 60 minutes during the HPAE-PAD run can also be used to identify adulteration.

Coffee. Carbohydrates also serve as tracers to assess the authenticity of instant coffee. Although an unlikely candidate for sugar analysis due to its characteristic bitter taste, at least 50 percent of the dry weight of raw coffee beans comprises coffee carbohydrates. As these undergo Maillard reaction during the roasting process, they contribute to the flavor, aroma, and viscosity of coffee. An HPAE-PAD-based method to determine the free and total carbohydrates in instant coffee has been prescribed by the Association of Analytical Chemists (AOAC) Official Method 995.136 and is currently used by the British Standards Institution. In a recent application study, the AOAC method was tested using the Thermo Scientific Dionex CarboPac SA10 column. The former method, which typically has a run time of 80 minutes, was made significantly faster by using the column. The quicker method had a run time of 10 minutes, only needed deionized water for continuous operation, and offered the same level of accuracy and sensitivity, differing only in its total analysis time and number of resolved peaks for coffee carbohydrate analysis.

All the food testing examples mentioned above justify the argument that, with the increasing demand for reproducible, fast, and simple methods to profile a wide variety of analytes in the food industry, HPAE-PAD has steadily emerged as a reliable method of choice to analyze carbohydrates.

Better Methods, Safer Food

As traditional methods used in the food industry start becoming outdated, new and problematic adulterants that are similar in structure to the genuine components can sneak into the food industry by taking advantage of either inadequate sensitivity or lack of specificity. Food testing laboratories will need to continually evaluate, test, and validate new methods to stay ahead of food fraud, while keeping up to date with regulations. Similarly, upgrading conventional methods with the latest technology makes them more robust and productive. Choosing the most appropriate method to accurately detect carbohydrate-based authenticity markers, such as HPAE-PAD, will result in safer food for the community and sustain consumer trust with the manufacturer.

Man is product marketing manager, IC/SP, chromatography and mass spectrometry for Thermo Fisher Scientific. Reach her at wai-chi.man@thermofisher.com.

The post Examining Food Authenticity with Sensitive Carbohydrate Analysis appeared first on Food Quality & Safety.

When I (Brian) was a kid, I remember eating dyed pistachios that turned my fingers pink. While the color was amusing to me then, it turned out that red food coloring had been used by the producer in Iran to cover stains, blotches, and mottled markings that occurred during harvesting and drying. I also remember news of cheap types of fish being substituted for or misbranded as the more expensive orange roughy or mahi mahi, misleading consumers to pay more for a lesser product. Each of these was considered food fraud and, unfortunately, the issue has not gone away.

In fact, due to increased oversight and detection tools, food fraud seems to be happening more than ever and is likely more prevalent in the supply chain than is widely known. As we can see from the examples above, it is not a new problem either; the practice of adulterating food for economically motivated reasons has been going on for years.

Estimated to cost the industry $30-40 billion annually, food fraud can take place through various means. The most common of these are adulteration by substitution, omission, dilution, falsification, deception in the production method or its origin, intentional mislabeling, or masking a defect or contamination.

In addition to the industry, brands, and products that can be impacted by fraudulent ingredients, end consumers are also harmed by food fraud. One example that resulted in a food safety issue is the wheat gluten that was contaminated with melamine to inflate its protein content measures and imported from China in 2007. When used as an ingredient in pet foods, it sickened and killed hundreds of cats and dogs by causing kidney failure in those animals.

Another instance of food fraud that may have caused illness occurred in 2015, when it was speculated that suppliers added cheaper ground up peanut shells and almond husks to ground cumin, a premium quality spice. Meant to “bulk up” the product and make it heavier to increase the supplier’s margins, the obvious concern was ingestion by consumers with peanut or tree nut (almond) allergies.

Food Fraud During a Pandemic

The current COVID-19 pandemic has likely further incentivized criminals to commit food fraud. In some countries, stay-at-home measures and employee illness have increased the number of employees absent from their jobs. One example was the number of positive virus cases in meatpacking plants here in the U.S., which has led to a reduction in the number of active operators in those plants, with the consequence being a decrease in production. In some cases, this decrease has led to a shortage of raw materials and consumer-ready products, creating a domino effect in the next links in the food supply chain. This shortage and others around the world are then sometimes replaced by fraudulent ingredients and products that don’t meet client and consumer expectations.

Dependence on materials imported from countries with food manufacturing workers impacted by the pandemic has also put the continuity of the supply chain at risk. International trade has been hindered due to the lack of appropriate logistics, with closed borders and a decrease in the availability of transportation preventing materials from arriving on time. Each of these has created an opportunity for fraudulent activity.

Further, because the economy in most countries has been impacted and consumers have lost some of their purchasing power, people are looking to buy products at the lowest possible cost. As a result, they may be more interested in a product’s price than the brand they are used to or its quality, thus increasing vulnerability in the products they are purchasing.

In each of these scenarios, fraudsters may be tempted to obtain economic gain through the intentional adulteration of the food. They may choose to send their clients lower quality materials, or they may replace, dilute, or modify, without declaration, certain ingredients or products, just to meet their customer’s order. They may also be taking advantage of the fact that clients have fewer personnel to supervise the reception and oversight of those materials due to the pandemic.

Assess, Implement, and Review

So, what can be done to minimize food fraud? Foremost, FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act and Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) Benchmarking Requirements require food manufacturing facilities to develop and document a food fraud vulnerability assessment and mitigation plan.

Generally, a risk or vulnerability assessment begins by understanding what ingredients are used at a facility to make your products. The Food Protection and Defense Institute defines the top 10 most fraudulent foods as alcoholic beverages, oils and fats, meat and meat products, honey, spices, grains and grain products, coffee and tea, fish and seafood, dairy, and produce. Separately, Decernis’ Food Fraud Database defines their top 10 most fraudulent foods as olive oil, milk, honey, saffron, orange juice, coffee, apple juice, grape wine, maple syrup, and vanilla extract.

Many of these ingredients are known historically to be at an increased risk for fraud, which means there is a higher risk of fraud in your supply chain if you are receiving or using these ingredients. As an example, the gap between production and consumption of both olive oil (specifically extra virgin olive oil) and honey has been studied. While the global industry is only currently producing a certain amount of these ingredients, the world consumes more than what is produced. Thus, they are being fraudulently diluted, substituted, concealed, or mislabeled.

When conducting a vulnerability assessment to determine the risk of fraud in your supply chain, consider historical risk as a factor within the assessment. Additional examples of risk factors could include your history or relationship with a supplier and complication of the supply chain, such as how many points along the supply chain the ingredient goes through until it reaches your facility. Economic factors can also make fraudulent activity more attractive and could include a pandemic or ecological factors such as drought, pestilence, and the nature of the ingredient, such as a powdered or liquid ingredient versus a solid item such as an apple.

Once these factors are chosen, you should develop a risk rating system. These ratings could be Low, Medium, and High or Minor, Major, and Critical; what this would mean for each risk factor must be identified. Next, conduct an assessment using the risk factors and risk rating system established, while documenting your results.

In addition to the high-risk ingredients, look at your most expensive ingredients. Often, those products that have assured status, such as organic, gluten-free, and non-GMO, are most easily susceptible to fraud. Others might be easy to adulterate and/or difficult to test, so manufacturers and suppliers need to stay current with historical and developing threats. Resources to do so are offered through various trade associations, government sources, and private centers. Some also offer access to food fraud databases and free assessment templates.

Once you identify the risk of potentially fraudulent activity for an ingredient during your vulnerability assessment and per GFSI requirements, you are required to develop and implement mitigation strategies to significantly minimize or prevent it. If you identify economically motivated adulteration (food fraud with a food safety issue), then you will need to develop or implement preventive controls. Some common strategies include supplier audits, sampling and testing, final product testing, and approved supplier programs.

Once you’ve completed your assessment and developed mitigation strategies to address identified risks, there is still work to do. You’ll need to review your program on a regular basis, understanding that fraudsters will always look for opportunities. For example, GFSI audits such as BRC and SQF require that a food fraud vulnerability assessment be conducted annually to consider the susceptibility of raw materials.

Further, it is important for suppliers and customers to maintain a close relationship while continuing to oversee supplier approval and evaluation processes. An in-depth, approved supplier program is essential. Processors must continue to carry out analysis that, based on their risk assessment, each has determined is necessary to corroborate the legitimacy and origin of the materials received. You must continue developing rapid and accessible analytical methodologies that identify in a timely manner whether a food is fraudulent.

You will also need to continually review and assess to determine if there is new information that may identify an increased risk of fraud. This process is called horizon scanning. An example of increasing risk of fraud could be the situation we have all experienced with the pandemic. As you scan the horizon, have there been disruptions specific to your supply chain and are you prepared for the next potential disruption?

The Need for Diligence

Unfortunately, there will always be unscrupulous people who will mislead consumers to achieve dishonest profits. These actions severely impact those companies that cannot compete against fraudulently low prices and poor quality, and that are unwilling to put consumers in harm’s way. Additionally, it seems that those who are responsible for committing fraud are often one step ahead of the rest of us. Once a possible adulteration case is detected, criminals are already working to go unnoticed again. As long as there is demand for a product, there will continue to be a threat of fraudulent activity related to that product.

However, more information is available today on the production methods used, the regions from which products originate, and the methods that allow for the identification of adulteration. There is also a wealth of information available to assist in planning and executing mitigation strategies.

While food fraud may not always be as easy to detect as red food coloring on your fingers, the steps to mitigating food fraud are definitely right at your fingertips.

Watterson is Food Safety Professional, Operations, Americas, AIB International. Reach him at bwatters@aibinternational.com. Hernandez is Food Safety Professional, Operations, Americas, AIB International. Reach her at ahernandez@aibinternational.com.

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Combating food fraud has different meanings depending on whom you ask along the supply chain. For growers, it refers to protecting the integrity of the ingredients they introduce into the supply chain. For the regulatory community, it means helping to reinforce and establish the authenticity of the food market so consumers don’t have to worry about the safety of the food that they eat. For food retailers or manufacturers, it’s about maintaining their brands’ integrity and value with consumers and the industry. For everyone involved—from farm to fork—it’s about ensuring there is a continued supply of safe food around the globe.

In order to battle food fraud, it is vital to provide a host of robust analytical and informatics solutions that can detect and analyze adulterants throughout the supply chain. Techniques such as infrared (IR) spectroscopy, liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) address food quality and safety and help consumers be more confident in the integrity of the food they eat.

First Line of Defense: UV-Vis and IR Spectroscopy

There are a number of different methods and technologies used to detect adulterants in food. The chosen method will depend on the type of food fraud that is being detected.

For example, a UV-visible light (UV-vis) spectrometer is considered a useful and simple instrument that detects adulterants in extra virgin olive oil. With olive oil consumption increasing, this high-value product has become particularly susceptible to fraud.

One example of olive oil fraud is the addition of lower grade, refined olive oils to extra virgin olive oil. These lower-quality oils contain unsaturated hydrocarbons that absorb UV light in the 200 nm-300 nm spectral range. Therefore, a high absorption within this wavelength range points to a lower quality olive oil, meaning UV-vis spectroscopy can be used to differentiate between oils in a sample.

Extra virgin olive oil can also often contain significant levels of other edible oils that have a lower market price or are of a lower quality. Some examples of common adulterants include hazelnut oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, rapeseed oil, or corn oil. UV-vis spectroscopy offers a simple method for checking whether an analysis result is above a specific limit, and therefore whether other oils have potentially been added to a sample of extra virgin olive oil.

In situations where there is uncertainty about the type of adulteration that may have taken place, IR spectroscopy is the preferred method for rapid, onsite analysis of samples in other commonly adulterated foods like honey and orange juice. As IR spectroscopy requires little sample preparation, it is also an easy-to-implement method that is useful in providing a rapid pass/fail analysis of adulteration. This, along with the fact that it does not require significant training to be operated, means IR spectroscopy can be used for testing at any point during the supply chain.

For example, herb and spice adulteration—such as replacing oregano with olive or myrtle leaves, the addition of dyes to chili powders, or adding peanut and almond material to ground cumin powder—is rapidly becoming more commonplace in the food industry and is a prime fit for IR spectroscopy. One issue with herb and spice samples, as with most food samples, is that they typically contain many sources of natural variation and are therefore difficult to analyze. Near-IR (NIR) spectroscopy can overcome this issue, enabling deeper penetration into samples in comparison to mid-IR or far-IR. NIR can therefore produce stronger spectra, making it easier to detect adulterants in these complex samples.

By combining this instrumentation with advanced analysis technology, it is possible to compare the spectra of a specific food sample with a database of known “pure” samples. These algorithms and chemometric techniques then enable users to classify complex samples, determine authenticity, and estimate the level of a certain adulterant without the need to run a further test.

After the 2008 melamine scandal in China, detecting adulteration in milk has also become a critical application for IR analysis. Typically, milk with a higher protein content will in turn attract a higher price in the market. Unfortunately, the typical methods for testing the protein content of a milk product are based around measuring nitrogen levels. This led to the nitrogen-rich, but highly toxic compound melamine being added to milk products in order to raise their apparent protein content. IR analysis is crucial in determining the concentration of this adulterant in milk, as well as identifying any other adulterants such as sugars or urea.

Next Level: LC-MS/MS and ICP-MS

In instances of food fraud where adulterants are at too low a concentration to be picked up by IR, or where stricter regulations demand more precise determination of adulterant levels, LC-MS/MS comes into play.

In the case of milk, for example, mass spectrometry offers an alternative method for the detection of adulterants. Aside from melamine and the addition of other small molecules, large molecules can also be added to milk for the purpose of fraud—for example, diluting more expensive milks such as buffalo, camel, goat, or sheep, with cow’s milk. By using LC-MS/MS, it is possible to measure the addition of bovine milk to these pricier milks by detecting the presence of β-lactoglobulin A. (See Figure 1.) This species-specific marker protein is found only in cow’s milk, enabling users to detect the presence of this cheaper alternative in other more expensive types of milk.

A similar method can be used to detect the presence of pork in certain foods, which is crucial for consumers whose culture or religion prohibits the consumption of this meat. Pork meat, like milk, contains certain peptides that can be used as biomarkers for detection in food samples. LC-MS/MS enables the detection of these biomarkers, offering a rapid, selective, and sensitive method for analyzing raw, cooked, and processed meat products for the presence of pork.

LC-MS/MS is also crucial for the detection of synthetic azo and non-azo dyes down to 10-100 ppb concentrations. Although once used in the industry as food colorings, these dyes have now been widely banned due to their potentially genotoxic or carcinogenic properties. However, they are still being detected in the food supply chain—particularly in spices—making it crucial that sensitive methods are available for the detection of even minuscule amounts of these banned substances. First, a simple dye extraction is performed using an organic solvent, with the filtrate then injected into the liquid chromatography column. Using certain methods, LC-MS/MS can achieve exceptional chromatographic repeatability and peak resolution in under four minutes.

Additionally, LC-MS/MS can be used to detect both adulterants and contaminants in wine. As with other food products such as olive oil, additives might be introduced into wine to improve its flavor or color. There is also a high chance pesticides or fungicides could end up in the final product if the grapevines have been sprayed with these compounds during growth. Both of these additives, whether intentional or unintentional, can cause significant harm to humans if ingested. It is therefore imperative that they are detected as quickly and reliably as possible. LC-MS/MS can simultaneously determine the concentrations of both pesticides and pigments in a single analytical run, providing users with a quick and easy method for monitoring these compounds in their products.

ICP-MS can also be used to combat fraud in wine by helping to determine the geographical origin of grapes—an important factor in driving product price and consumer expectations.

Using ICP-MS, it is possible to identify the unique and varying levels of trace elements present in the wine. After an elemental profile is created by ICP-MS, informatics solutions can then deliver a visualization of the data correlating the levels of trace elements in certain wines to that in different, geographically situated soils. (See Figure 2.)

Future of Combating Food Fraud

Although food fraud is certainly not a new concept, the increasing cost of food ingredients is making it more common. This is combined with ever-stricter regulations and the fact that those committing food fraud are also becoming more creative and intelligent in finding new ways to adulterate food. It’s therefore clear that the more in-depth information available on fraudulent activity, the more effectively fraud can be reduced and controlled.

Advanced yet intuitive testing innovations will continue to play a big role in helping to combat these challenges at all points of the food chain. Informatics will also continue to emerge as an ever-critical component in the fight against food fraud. With informatics, labs, scientists, organizations, and companies have easier and more intelligent ways to visualize their data. Data can be shared more easily and securely via the cloud, and actionable insights can be drawn more quickly and easily. The food industry and solutions providers must therefore continue to work closely together to ensure optimal and advancing instrumentation and tools are being leveraged to help uphold the integrity of the food supply chain.

Sears is vice president and general manager of food, chromatography, and mass spectrometry at PerkinElmer. Reach him at Greg.Sears@perkinelmer.com. Tordenmalm is market manager for processed foods at PerkinElmer. Reach him at Stefan.Tordenmalm@perkinelmer.

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