Traceability, food

Brereton P. Preface to the special issue Food authenticity and traceability Food Chem 2010 118 887. 

As stated previously, traceability is fundamental to establishing and eliminating the root cause of nonconforming product and therefore it should be mandatory in view of the requirements for Corrective Action. Providing traceability can be an onerous task. Some applications require products to be traced back to the original ingot from which they were produced. In situations of safety or national security it is necessary to identify product in such a manner because if a product is used in a critical application and subsequently found defective, it may be necessary to track down all other products of the same batch and eliminate them before there is a disaster. It happens in product recall situations. It is also very important in the automobile and food industries in fact, any industry where human life may be at risk due to a defective product being in circulation. 

Although the work of ATCC and others has done much to ensure the reproducibility and even demonstrate some traceability of microbiological reference materials the development of microbiological Certified Reference Materials (CRMs), certified for number of viable life forms is seen as important for control analyses of water and food. Somewhat of a holy grail the development of such CRMs has long been hampered by the unstable concentration and insufficient homogeneity of viable organisms in the materials. 

Lees, M. (2003). Food Authenticity and Traceability. Woodhead Publishing Ltd., Cambridge, UK. 

The benefits of producing good data are therefore broad and impinge on all of our daily lives, whether it is food, environment, health or trade. Laboratories that produce valid measurements have a higher status in the analytical world, since they produce data that are demonstrably traceable to a reference standard and reliable, with the cost of correcting bad data being lower. This means that such laboratories have a better chance of competing in the open market. 

Lenstra, J. A. (2003). DNA methods for identifying plant and animal species in food. In "Food Authenticity and Traceability" (M. Lees, Ed.), pp. 34—53. CRC Press, Boca Raton. 

From the consumer s point of view as well, controls on food products are needed, from a food safety and traceability perspective. The problem of adulteration and falsification of food has ancient roots which date back to the Roman Age and continue, through the Middle and Modem Ages, till nowadays the deployment of new analytical tools for fraud detection has caused a parallel progress in the adulteration procedures, which has gradually evolved from coarse and rudimentary systems to highly sophisticated and scarcely detectable strategies. 

The development and innovation of the agricultural and food industry rely generically on two fundamental axes food safety and food quality. The more and more complexity of the food chain demands the development of efficient traceability systems which guarantee the firmness of all chain links. In this context, a clear priority is defined in the development of molecular methods of detection, analysis and diagnosis. These methods should be rapid, of high sensitivity and should permit automated screening. 

Measurement of parameters which cannot be related to SI, such as fat and fiber content of food and pH can be made traceable to other references according to the same principles as discussed above. 

The purpose of this paper is to consider the other end of the spectrum, namely, to look at cases where traceability links are essential to the success of the application. From a societal point of view, some of the most pressing applications have to do with food safety, clinical laboratory results, and protecting the quality of the environment. Traceability of measurements to those of a national laboratory is of great importance to these latter applications. 

A very broad spectrum of applications is encompassed in the papers, ranging from the determination of element concentrations in water to biotechnology-created substance concentrations in food. This range is particularly broad in terms of the degree of difficulty of establishing traceability. The reports clearly show that whereas traceability in the former case has been largely implemented, its establishment in the latter case is still outside the available possibilities. 

Traceability in testing food derived from modern biotechnology (one contribution)... 

To improve measurement capability of field laboratories, CENAM has also been offering a PT scheme, not only because there are few PT providers in Mexico, but also due to the need to promote traceable measurement by the use of reference value provided by CENAM. Following the successful implementation of a PT program for environmental measurement laboratory assessment made by authorities of three local governments [8], similar efforts have been made to promote among laboratories who could be considered in the future as reference laboratories in food, petrochemical, clinical [9] and industrial sectors. 

An excellent review on the subject has been recently published by Agrawal et al. (5) not only reporting technical issues and solutions around proteomics investigations but also extending the context to food security throughout reducing pathogen risk and food traceability to prevent frauds. Unfortunately,... 

Alongside protein biomarkers in human health, markers of food security even for plant proteins might become essential for the determination of food security and authenticity. In the actual world where products travel rapidly throughout continents, one of the main items for security is the traceability of products to try finding the origin of a possible health problem and make corrective actions. The case reported in June 2011 on the contamination of soya germs by a mutant of E. coli was symptomatic of what is the current risk for human health requiring a formal traceability of plant products and fully sensitive analysis. 

Food authentication is one of the major areas involved in food quality and safety. Several regulations have been implemented to assure correct information and to avoid species substitutions (26). Food species identification has traditionally relied on morphological/anatomical analysis. However, this is a difficult task in the case of closely related species and especially for those products that have been subjected to processing practices. Therefore, there is a strong need for fast and reliable molecular identification methods that provide authorities and food industries the tools needed to comply with labeling and traceability requirements, thus ensuring product quality and protection of the consumer. 

Foodomics in Food Safety, Quality, and Traceability Studies... 

Thus, Foodomics can help to solve some of the new challenges that modem food safety, quality, and traceability have to face. These challenges encompass the multiple analyses of contaminants, allergens, the establishment of more-powerful analytical methodologies to guarantee food origin, trace-ability and quality, the discovery of biomarkers to detect unsafe products or the capability to detect food safety problems before they grow and affect more consumers, etc. 

Apart from the challenges to be faced in the near future in food science and nutrition already described above (e.g., the production of new functional foods with scientifically proved claims the improvement of food safety, quality, and traceability the development, production, and monitoring of new transgenic foods, including the so-called second-generation GM crops environmental sustainability, etc.), there are other interesting trends and opportunities that can be anticipated for Foodomics that are described below. 

Measurement results and standards are internationally accepted via their demonstrated comparability and known quality. The test results of a food testing laboratory that is accredited to the ISO/IEC 17025 Standard should be recognized in other countries where laboratory performance is also assessed in accordance with this Standard. This is an aspect of the ILAC MRA [31]. The ISO/IEC 17025 Standard requires traceability to internationally accepted stated references together with their stated measurement uncertainties [22]. 

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