Top posters at FoodIntegrity 2016

A spectroscopic method for rapidly screening food products has won the top award at this year’s FoodIntegrity conference.

The team from lab equipment company Waters and Imperial College London in the UK won first place for their poster detailing the use of rapid evaporative ionisation mass spectrometry (REIMS) to rapidly distinguish between meat and fish samples.

The technique can be carried out without any prior sample preparation, which is a key advantage over other techniques such as “ELISA, genomics, chromatography, spectroscopy or mass spectrometry.”

Tests can be undertaken directly from the surface of the sample using a number of techniques, with the “smoke” generated transferred to the REIMS device. The technique provides a profile of the lipid content of the sample, and allowed the team to distinguish between meats from different species and look for the presence of offal in processed meat products.

The results are generated in near real-time thanks to prototype software due to be unveiled at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASM) conference in San Antionio, Texas, next month.

“Due to their high market value, meat and fish products are often targets for species substitution, adulteration, mislabelling and questions raised about geographic origin or means of production,” they note.

“Testing food is one of the key ways of checking whether food businesses are complying with food law.”

Second-place in the awards went to researchers at the University of Parma and the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano Reggiano, for a poster describing how to detect counterfeit cheeses using gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to detect profiles of cyclopropane fatty acids (CPFAs).

CPFAs are detected when the cheese is made from cows fed silage - something that is not permitted in the product specifications for Parmigiano Reggiano and other cheeses such as Grana Padano and Fontina from Italy, France's Comte and Gruyere from Switzerland.

The third position went to a poster from researchers at the Prague University of Chemistry and Technology and the Scotch Whisky Research Institute in Edinburgh, which compared and contrasted two techniques - gas chromatography/high-resolution mass spectrometry (GC-HMRS) and direct analysis in real time/high resolution mass spectrometry (DART-HRMS) - in the detection of counterfeit blends and single malt whiskies.