The FoodAuthenticity research page has recently been updated with a number of additional research reports and SOP references. About 12 projects have been added, covering topics a wide range of toics, including IR and Raman determination of vegetable oil species, feasibility of spectral imaging for food authenticity, proteomics and metagenomics methods, and a review of methods for distinguishing mechanically recovered meat. An SOP for calibration and use of IR and Raman methods for vegetable oils has also been added to our document site at http://documents.foodauthenticity.uk.
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Authenticate is a cloud based technology platform, developed by the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) and the Seasoning and Spices Association (SSA) in liaison with the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Scotland (FSS), which provides companies with a tool to help combat food fraud in herbs and spices.
Basic Membership to the Authenticate system is free.
The National Food Crime Unit has today launched Food Crime Confidential. This is a reporting facility where anyone with suspicions about food crime can report them safely and in confidence, over the phone or through email. The facility is particularly targeted at those working in or around the UK food industry.
The FSA’s National Food Crime Unit (NFCU) works with partners to protect people from serious criminal activity that impacts the safety or authenticity of food and drink they consume.
Food crime involves dishonesty at any stage in the production or supply of food. It is often complex and likely to be seriously detrimental to consumers, businesses or the general public interest.
NFCU would like to receive any information relating to suspected dishonesty involving food, drink or animal feed. In addition to identifying and being able to tackle specific instances of food crime, such information will help us learn more about the circumstances that make offending possible.
The Food Authenticity Network has launched a new member products and services announcement page.
This page is for members to post brief articles or announcements concerning new products or services that may help other members monitor, detect or manage food authenticity issues. We encourage links to press releases or more detailed articles on members' own websites so further information is available to members who require it.
This is a great opportunity for members to inform the network of new developments related to food authenticity testing.
Please sign up to the Network to get all the posts and follow the page to get email alerts of new posts.
We look forward to hearing about your exciting new developments..........
Defra have approved the listing of 13 Centres of Expertise in Food Authenticity testing. Centres of Expertise are designated by self-declaration assessed against criteria set by the Authenticity Methods Working Group. Further information can be found at the links below:
FoodAuthenticity.uk is built on a social networking platform so that members can start discussions, participate, and receive updates and alerts on topics that interest them. To help members find out more about using the site we've published a set of hints and tips on using the site, controlling updates, how to contact other members and other features of the site.
To find out more, head over to the Hints and Tips page. Members will also find a link to the hints and tips page under the "My Page" tab on the menu.
Hi Food Authenticity Network Member
Please see the attached questionnaire which has been sent out under the CEN TC 275 banner the CEN Technical Committee which deals with horizontal methods of analysis for food. I shall have to put together a response for this on behalf of BSI and would be grateful for any comments that you might have on the questionnaire.
There are advantages to proceed along the lines being suggested, most notably a wider audience for any methods of analysis that the Network may put up (wider in that CEN is a European wide organisation, which you may regard as the European daughter of ISO for the moment). The disadvantage is that any methods issued as CEN Standards/Reports would then attract a charge.
Many thanks
Best wishes
Roger
(Chairman BSI AW/275)
CEN-TC275_N1526_Questionaire_Food_Authenticity.pdf
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Dr Roger Wood, Cringleford, Norwich, UK
I may be contacted at:
Mobile: 07725 419921
e-mail: roger.shirley@btinternet.com
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Major food adulteration and contamination events occur with alarming regularity and are known to be episodic, with the question being not if but when another large-scale food safety/integrity incident will occur. Indeed, the challenges of maintaining food security are now internationally recognised. The ever increasing scale and complexity of food supply networks can lead to them becoming significantly more vulnerable to fraud and contamination, and potentially dysfunctional. This can make the task of deciding which analytical methods are more suitable to collect and analyse (bio)chemical data within complex food supply chains, at targeted points of vulnerability, that much more challenging. It is evident that those working within and associated with the food industry are seeking rapid, user-friendly methods to detect food fraud and contamination, and rapid/high-throughput screening methods for the analysis of food in general. In addition to being robust and reproducible, these methods should be portable and ideally handheld and/or remote sensor devices, that can be taken to or be positioned on/at-line at points of vulnerability along complex food supply networks and require a minimum amount of background training to acquire information rich data rapidly (ergo point-and-shoot). Here we briefly discuss a range of spectrometry and spectroscopy based approaches, many of which are commercially available, as well as other methods currently under development. We discuss a future perspective of how this range of detection methods in the growing sensor portfolio, along with developments in computational and information sciences such as predictive computing and the Internet of Things, will together form systems- and technology-based approaches that significantly reduce the areas of vulnerability to food crime within food supply chains. As food fraud is a problem of systems and therefore requires systems level solutions and thinking.
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/ay/c5ay02048d
D.I. Ellis, H.Muhamadali, S.A. Haughey, C.T. Elliott and R. Goodacre, Analytical Methods
Links to some key regulations for food authenticity control have now been added to the site: see the 'legislation' tab on the extended Policy and Law page.
