Food fingerprinting to combat fraud
10 Mar 2014
The chemical fingerprinting of food samples will be key in the fight against food fraud, according to experts at a major laboratory products exhibition in the US last week.
Speaking at the Pittcon conference and expo in Chicago last week, scientists and academics from both the UK and US food sectors said that one of the next steps in fighting food crime is to create a “chemical fingerprint” of samples to better understand when a commodity has been contaminated.
Chemical fingerprinting involves the isolation of individual components within a sample so that researchers can understand each part of its chemical make-up, and compare it to a variety of other pure and adulterated samples.
Nobody must know what is being tested or why it is being tested
Prof Chris Elliott
To perform chemical fingerprinting, researchers can utilise two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC-GC) to isolate a sample’s various chemical components.
Similar methods were used in 2010 to analyse sheen samples of oil found floating at the ocean’s surface near the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
This technique proved it was possible to possible to fingerprint petroleum and refined petroleum products accurately and on a compound-specific level using GC-GC.
Now food fraud experts are employing such methods to test for food adulteration as, according to Professor Chris Elliott, director of the institute for global food safety at Queen’s University Belfast, food criminals are thought to understand many of the current testing criteria.
“Many food criminals have a good understating of supply chains,” said Elliot, who also led the government’s review of the food supply chain in the wake of the horsemeat crisis.
”Therefore, random testing is essential. Nobody must know what is being tested or why it is being tested.”
In understanding the chemical fingerprint of a wide variety of products, experts said it would be possible to develop new testing systems where businesses can perform their own quality control procedures.
A technique currently in development would allow those firms that test products such as meats, oils or cheeses to find our whether a sample contains what it is meant to, or whether it contains a foreign body.
Elliott explained that once fully implemented, the new technique could be something as simple as a “green light/red light” system that will tell a user if their product has been tampered with or not.
