A high-tech, handheld device promises to help businesses better target their food authenticity testing. By Nick Hughes.
Could a new portable testing device transform the way in which UK businesses keep food fraud at bay?
That’s the hope of its developers who include one of the world’s leading authorities on food fraud, Professor Chris Elliott, author of the UK Government’s 2014 review into the horsemeat scandal.
Currently, businesses wanting to test for food fraud have to take random samples of batches of goods and send them off to a laboratory for testing, often waiting several weeks for a result by which point a contaminated batch has most likely already left the factory and entered the food chain.
Writing in New Food magazine recently, Elliott described how the first-of-its-kind hand held device, which is currently being brought to market by Bia Analytical, a spin-off company from the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast, combines state-of-the-art miniaturised hardware, cloud based computing and artificial intelligence (AI)-based modelling to tell the user in real time whether a food product has been adulterated.
The device uses a form of molecular spectroscopy that shines near-infrared light onto a small food sample. The energy from the light produces a vibrational fingerprint which is sent, via a smartphone, to a database of food fingerprint models stored in the cloud. Within a matter of seconds the results are sent back to the authenticity app on the smartphone: green for authentic, amber for suspect and red for non-authentic.
Although both suspect and non-authentic samples have to then be sent to a lab to confirm the presence of an adulterant, Elliott tells Footprint that the device allows users to be much more targeted in what they are sending for further testing. “In food authenticity, over 95% of tests come back and say everything’s fine. That shows there’s a big waste of money there and it also shows how it’s very difficult [for businesses] to know where the problems really are.”
By providing users with a real time view of possible adulteration Elliott says the technology means companies will be able to hold onto a suspect batch of products until it is confirmed they are safe to enter the supply chain, reducing the risk of expensive product recalls.
Spice test
I was recently asked by BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme to help road test the new device on a range of herbs and spices bought from major supermarkets and independent retailers. In total seven samples, 11% of the total, were confirmed to be non-authentic including oregano, black pepper and paprika. Each adulterated product was purchased from an independent retailer rather than a national supermarket chain, suggesting that efforts by major retailers to tighten up their food fraud defences in the wake of the horsemeat scandal are bearing fruit.
Herbs and spices are attractive targets for fraudsters due to their high value and the relative ease with which adulteration can be disguised. Dried oregano, for instance, can be relatively easily mixed with olive or myrtle leaf without detection by the naked eye.
The portable device has the ability to work across a wide range of different foods and ingredients once specific chemometric models (statistical models used for predicting properties based on chemical data) have been built. This involves taking authentic samples and training the AI to recognise their molecular patterns so that it can tell when tested samples are potentially inauthentic. Elliott says Bia Analytical is currently doing a lot of development work on commodities including vegetable oils, rice and tea, all of which come with a high risk of adulteration.
Interest in the device is coming both from food businesses themselves and from third party certification bodies who want to use it within their audits. Elliott says Bia Analytica has also had “good conversations” with regulators including the Food Standards Agency over future applications for the technology, albeit public spending on food sampling and testing has come under huge pressure of late as councils grapple with cuts to their funding from central government.
Ten years after Elliott published his landmark review, the fight against food fraud has reached a new level of sophistication.
