International Community Responds to Melamine Scare

The use of multiple methods can complicate both the interpretation of results and their use to assure compliance to MRL regulations. Efforts to produce one global set of methods for each technology platform and each contaminant for a particular food type could lessen confusion over results interpretation, reduce testing times, and lower production costs.

Food Traceability

Ultimately, assuring the safety of food requires tracking it from the farm through the processing plant to the consumer. In the EU, documentation is required to identify the suppliers of food, feed, food-producing animals, and ingredients in products, as well as the businesses to which products have been supplied. In the United States, the new country of origin law identifies the country from which the food is being imported.

Several other countries, including Japan and Canada, also have fairly high traceability requirements, and organizations such as the Codex Alimentarius Commission of the WHO are developing recommendations for traceability in the food industry. In addition, firms across the U.S. food industry are now adopting their own traceability systems in order to improve production and distribution efficiency, differentiate their products, and monitor and control food safety. Benefits of adoption include lower cost distribution, reduced recall expense, and the ability to charge higher prices for products with documented origin.

No matter which tracking system a company adopts, it is vital that the system provide the appropriate level of breadth, depth, and precision. A tracking system that compiles information on all of a food’s attributes would be prohibitively expensive, so the critical parameters must be identified. In order to assure food safety, the depth of the system (how far back it can track a product) is dependent on those points where hazards can occur and remedies can be applied. The required precision with which the system can track a food product can also vary. For example, while it is necessary to track meat back to a specific cow in order to rule out mad cow disease, it may not be necessary to track wheat beyond the grain elevator.

As the ability of the food industry to trace a food’s path through the production system improves and expands, efforts to globally harmonize standards, regulations, and tracking systems should continue. This will assure the ability to quickly identify a food safety issue, track it to its source anywhere in the world, and take timely steps to prevent or limit any health threat.

Ultimately, assuring food safety requires highly sensitive, selective, and reproducible methods for monitoring a wide variety of foods for contamination. The challenge is made greater by the reality that foods are very complex matrices, necessitating a wide range of sample preparation methods that are often time-consuming and costly, and which must be applied before analysis can begin. In order to adapt to new threats, rapid development of simple, fast, and reliable sample preparation methods and assays for new substances of interest, based on technologies already used in testing laboratories, is necessary.

As industry’s ability to trace foods path through the production system improves and expands, efforts to globally harmonize standards, regulations, and tracking systems should continue.

Denise Ibens is a food industry marketing manager for Agilent Technologies. Reach her at [email protected] or (302) 633-8534.