Economically motivated adulteration of food products, such as melamine in dairy to raise the protein level, presents a huge challenge in the marketplace and threatens the integrity of the food supply chain. A developing approach for detecting adulteration is screening food and food ingredients for adulteration using non-targeted approaches. Rather than detecting specific known adulterants, the non-targeted approach uses a priori knowledge on the profile of normal or authentic materials; then combines the output of an assay (typically using electronic tools) with chemometrics to discriminate authentic from abnormal materials. The goal is an authenticating system with sufficiently rapid response for routine inspections. A variety of spectral or hyphenated chromatographic-detector approaches have been investigated for specific food matrices.
On Tuesday morning from 7:15–8:15 am in Room 396, Session 212 Non-Targeted Analytical Approaches for Detecting Economically Motivated Adulteration of Food and Food Ingredients: Part 1 will highlight promising research to date and identify challenges and opportunities to transform these approaches into tools that can be used in routine Quality Assessment settings for raw material screening to guard against adulteration in the food supply. Part 2 (Session 223) of the symposium will subsequently take place from 8:30–10:00 am in Room 396.
