Food Fraud
Food Fraud
Food fraud are increasingly common nowadays and these counterfeit foods can be produced by deliberate substituting, diluting or mislabeling of food, ingredients and packaging. Global food safety is threatened as the consumption of these food may lead to severe health issues (e.g. melamine in infant milk).
Direct and simple spectroscopic methods such as FTIR could be used to detect some of such counterfeit food. However, for food-producing companies who are trying to cheat the system, to detect and reveal such cases would require more advanced techniques like MS. Food authentication and traceability are also achievable with these analytical techniques.
Maple syrup is a natural sweetener made from the concentrated sap of sugar maple trees.Grocery stores carry a wide variety of maple syrup in different colors and flavors to meet the diverse needs of consumers. There are also inexpensive products that contain corn syrup or corn syrup with the flavor and aroma of maple syrup. In this application, we qualitatively and quantitatively determined various sugars in genuine and inexpensive maple syrup using FTIR measurements and chemometric analysis.
There is a growing concern about issues related to food safety, such as misrepresentation of product origin and contamination of foreign substances. Scientific methods are being used to prevent food fraud and inspect food ingredients. These include determining the type of meat or rice using DNA analysis, and identifying the origin of agricultural products through elemental analysis and three-dimensional flourescence measurement.