Field-deployable Analytical Methods to Assess the Authenticity, Safety and Quality of Food

The project will identify and select appropriate analytical techniques and develop protocols to assess the authenticity, safety and quality of food in a field-deployable context.  Milk powder and vegetable oils will be used as exemplar commodities to establish methods and guidance for ‘front-line’ food adulteration screening. Recurrent food authenticity and safety crises endanger public health and provoke loss of public confidence. These crises may also result in loss of substantial economic value by authentic product manufacturers and discredit entire economic sectors leading to barriers to international trade. Consequently, national gate-keepers, both food control regulators and customs authorities, find themselves under public pressure whilst not being adequately equipped with food adulteration screening technology to stand up to the challenge of uncovering food fraud.   The aim of this CRP is to close the gap between capabilities confined to sophisticated research labs, and technologies that can be utilised by various national gate-keepers in developing countries, namely national customs authorities & food regulators. The opportunity to accomplish this ambitious goal stems from a rapid and on-going reduction in the cost of analytical equipment and a rapid increase in its portability. Throughout the last decade the analytical instrument industry has delivered new families of handheld, portable and transportable tools. This project will consider applications based on hand-held and portable devices including (but not limited to) ion mobility spectrometry (IMS), near infra-red (NIR) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometers and some bench-top laboratory instruments that have become ‘field’ transportable including laser induced breakdown spectrometry (LIBS), laser ablation molecular isotopic spectrometry (LAMIS), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, mass spectrometry (MS) and multi-spectral imaging (MSI). This CRP is conducted jointly with the Nuclear Sciences Instrumentation Laboratory under CRP G42007.