News

This UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) 'Food for Thought' seminar breaks down key findings based on FSA project FS900408 Guidance for Point Of Contact Technologies.

Industry experts Malcolm Burns and Gavin Nixon of the National Measurement Laboratory present results from a current review of the potential for point of contact technology for food testing for both official controls and the wider food sector. They provide an overview of key terms, technologies, trends and barriers to adoption, and provide recommendations to further develop a framework to support point of contact food testing.

This seminar has been added to the eSeminars section of FAN's training pages.

FSA’s monthly Food for Thought seminars share insights from FSA and external research on topics relevant to the food system. Each session features a presentation followed by a Q&A. Recordings of previous seminars are available to watch back on the FSA’s YouTube channel.

The seminar series is open to all - if you’d like to receive future invitations, please sign up to the Food for Thought mailing list. 

Seed fraud, particularly the misrepresentation of rice paddy (unhusked rice grain) as rice seed, is a growing concern that threatens sustainability efforts.

This study (open access) proves the concept of using a portable NIR spectroscopic device, combined with chemometric analysis, for rapid onsite identification of rice seed and paddy varieties for real-time verification of seed authenticity.

A total of 280 rice samples, representing four varieties (Agra, Amankwatia, Legon 1, and Jasmine 85) across two categories (seeds and paddy), were analyzed.

After applying various pre-processing techniques and principal component analysis (PCA), the authors report that linear discriminant functions 1 and 2 revealed distinct clustering patterns for both the varieties and categories (rice seed and paddy). Among the classification algorithms used, Random Forest (RF) achieved 100 % accuracy for rice seed identification and 97.38 % for paddy identification in the test sets. Support Vector Machine (SVM) demonstrated 98.15 % accuracy in distinguishing between rice seed and paddy for detecting seed fraud.

The authors conclude that such a portable NIR device can reliably perform varietal identification and seed authenticity checks, including use by seed inspectors, farmers, and regulatory officers.

Photo by Prahlad Inala on Unsplash

The last decade has witnessed significant advances in analytical technologies with the capabilities to support food integrity and authenticity testing within the rapidly evolving food industry. Devices that allow diagnostic tests to be performed at or near the point of need, often termed Point-of-contact (POC), represent a growing area within the food sector with the potential to provide real-time monitoring of input materials and production process. POC devices can range from handheld spectroscopic devices such as Raman and FT-IR instruments to desktop portable systems inclusive of compact mass spectrometry, NMR and next generation sequencing (NGS) systems.

UK National Measurement Laboratory at LGC

The term Point of Contact (POC) testing relates to a mode of analytical testing that can be conducted at the point of sampling, with a minimal requirement for analyst training, providing easily interpreted results in real-time.

This e-seminar provides an overview of POC testing, describes the range of analytical techniques that have been adopted, and lists examples of current and emerging devices for use with POC testing; It has been added to the e-seminars part of the Training section.

The e-seminar is intended for individuals working in academia, the food industry and those involved with the UK official control system.

The production of this e-seminar was funded by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Food Standards Agency, Food Standards Scotland and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, BEIS, via the Government Chemist, under the Joint Knowledge Transfer Framework for Food Standards and Food Safety Analysis. Cofunding was provided by the Scottish Government's National Transition Training Fund programme in collaboration with the Manufacturing Skills Academy at the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland.