In order to highlight this important issue, Shimadzu India, a leading name in offering food safety solutions, held the "Shimadzu Asia Food Safety Seminar Series 2012" during the first week of August in five centres across the country.
While ensuring food to be safe for human consumption is becoming challenging due to increasing chance of contamination at every stage of processing, the tightening of food safety regulations in India through Food Safety & Standards Act, 2006, is a major step.
The regulations have made compliance difficult for food producers and food testing labs by introducing stringent norms. Tighter norms also mean that food testing labs would have to analyse complex samples and measure various types of contaminants or toxicants present in very low quantity.
In this regard, Shimadzu is a major player globally which provides total solutions to handle such challenges easily and productively. With its long experience in manufacturing high quality instruments, the company offers wide range of systems and solutions for analysing and assuring total food safety.
In order to discuss these challenges in food safety analysis in India and the latest solutions for the same, the aforementioned seminars held in Kochi, Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore were attended by a large number of stakeholders from the food Industry, regulatory agencies, food testing service labs, food research scientists, natural product exporters and so on.
The speakers from government regulatory / accreditation agencies, leaders in food safety analysis, technical experts from Shimadzu's Global Application Development Centre, Kyoto, Japan, and Customer Support Centres in Singapore and Mumbai, spoke on various emerging challenges in food testing and the current technological developments that offer solutions to handle the challenges.
The seminar had experts offering insight into the regulatory norms set by various countries around the world and the details of FSSA that are expected to be implemented by end of 2012.
While the participants felt that the FSSA implementation would be a challenge in a big country like India, they welcomed the move by Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) indicating that sooner or later the food industry and food testing labs needed to gear up for implementation of food safety quality management in-house resources and address their infrastructure requirements in a planned manner.
The seminars looked at following four major areas in food safety:
P1 - Production: Improper and excessive use of pesticides is one of the major concerns in food safety. The total number of chemical contaminants and natural toxins such as mycotoxins accounts to about 18,000 to date.
P2 - Processing: In accordance with faster pace of life, fast food, processed food is becoming a part of our life. In order to make the food more attractive, tasty and cost-efficient, food manufacturers are using new additives, colours and flavours which may be highly toxic for human consumption.
P3 - Preservation: Natural preservatives are safe for consumption, however, they are not effective for longer storage time hence use of chemical preservatives is essential to avoid microbial contamination in food, especially in meat products and processed food. Non-permitted preservatives and high quantity of chemical preservatives are dangerous as they may cause serious side-effects on human health. The antimicrobials, antifungal chemicals prevent the food from microbial contamination however the excess quantity of drugs is harmful for human consumption.
P4 - Packaging: Various types of packaging methods and materials are getting introduced everyday which assures better preservation and attractive looks; however it is a major concern in food safety regarding the leaching and harmful chemicals from packaging materials. The chemicals like Bisphenol A leaching from the packing material is potential harm to humans.
The contaminants may be broadly classified as chemical and biological contaminants.
Chemical contaminants would include pesticides, drug antibiotics, heavy metals, and environmental contaminants such as PAHs, PCBs, dioxins and furans.
Analysis of Residual Pesticides
Residual pesticides in agricultural produce have become a very serious social problem. It is important to conduct strict monitoring of food as they can contain pesticides that are unsafe for human consumption. Shimadzu LC and GC instruments permit rapid and high-sensitive analysis of residual pesticides in compliance with the official analytical methods. With next generation UHPLC system Nexera, it is possible to analyse the samples about 20 times faster and with higher sensitivity, resolution at significantly lower cost per analysis.
Hyphenated techniques GC-MSMS and LC-MSMS permit multi-component simultaneous analysis and identification testing for screening applications. The LCMS-8030 and LCMS-8040 are the new generation triple quadrapole systems that employ Shimadzu pioneered concept of UFMS (Ultrafast Mass Spectrometry) that enable about 600 MRM measurements per minute, making it possible to analyse large number of samples quickly with one instrument itself.
A standard method package for pesticide analysis is provided to ensure quick startup and method validations by the labs so as to obtain the regulatory accreditations quickly.
Analysis of Veterinary Drugs
There is increasing concern about the effect of consuming food that may contain residual drugs. These are due to the result of synthetic antimicrobial, antibiotics added to animal feed or directly injected into animals to enhance productivity of meat and seafood. Shimadzu LC and LC MS systems have high separation and selectivity capabilities that are needed to check presence of such banned and restricted drugs in food products. Here again the standard method package increases the productivity and enable quick startup.
Analysis of Food Additive
A wide variety of additives are used in foods such as preservatives, sweeteners and antioxidants. These may contain prohibited dyes (e.g. Sudan dye in curry powder) and other chemicals in excess that are harmful to health. Shimadzu UV-Vis Spectrophotometers, HPLCs, and LC-MS systems can detect and measure various dyes and monitor the food products.
Analysis of Mycotoxins
Over 300 Mycotoxins are known, including aflatoxin, patulin and fumonisin. Aflatoxin is highly carcinogenic toxic substance caused by a mould. As this mould grows on crops such as peanuts and corn, it is extremely important to monitor them due to adverse effect on human health. Nexera with LCMS 8030/8040 can help to the full analysis known aflatoxin analogues G1, G2, B1 and B2 in just under three minutes.
Analysis of Toxic Metals
Toxic metals (arsenic, lead, cadmium etc.) in food must be controlled down to low concentration levels. Cadmium in rice is a common example. Shimadzu provides solution with its atomic absorption spectrophotometer and ICP emission spectrometer that allow high-sensitive analysis trace elements in food. Shimadzu also provides X-ray fluorescence spectrometers that can perform elemental analysis without sample pre-treatment. These are ideal for screening analysis and emergency analysis.
Analysis of Biological Contamination
Microbial contamination of presence of unwanted micro organism in food is the major reason for many food safety crises and has also been a big challenge to monitor for it takes long time for analysis. Shimadzu provides innovative solution based on its Axima Maldi - MS platform that can identify such microorganisms in less than two minutes. The solution includes system software and databases that would improve significantly the capability to monitor and measure microbial contaminants.
Analysis of Extraneous Matter
Control and elimination of extraneous matter has been of great interest in recent years in addition to the chemical and microbiological hazards. A number of foreign objects in food cause serious health effects - insects, metal pieces, glass, sand, paper, blades, etc. are a few examples that have to be prevented from entering the food chain. As regulations become stringent, modern food manufacturers rely upon established spectroscopy techniques such as energy dispersive X-ray (EDX), Fourier Transform InfraRed (FT-IR), Atomic Absorption (AAS), and Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission (ICPE) can provide a faster, reliable and sensitive way for detection of foreign objects, trace elements, organo-metallics etc. in various matrices. In many cases, samples are analysed without sample preparation, thus making them fast and effective methods for screening and batch releases in production areas.
The Energy Dispersive X-Ray is a superior technology to screen foreign objects besides being enabling elemental analysis in foods. The technology enables elemental analysis in chocolates, wrapping film and cold tablet etc. FT-IR Spectroscopy helps in analysis of organic contaminants. By using technique like ATR we can analyse sample / contaminant in a non-destructive way. Using FTIR microscope, microscopic objects and microscopic regions to the order of 10µM can be analysed. Many other applications have been used in FT-IR such as detection of organic contaminants in powders, analysis of trans fatty acids in fats and oils, etc.
AAS and ICPE have made deep inroads in food safety monitoring with a number of test methods developed for detection and measurement of heavy metals in foods at sub ppm and ppb level - cadmium in rice, lead in many food products including sugar are some of the examples. ICPE helps in analysis of complex food matrices for a very large number of elements in a single run with very high sensitivity and is slowly becoming the technique of choice for elemental monitoring in foods.
Achieving the desired level of safety in food would need high level of quality checks and the infrastructure to handle large volume of workloads in each laboratory. During the seminar, the speakers spoke in detail about the need to have strong laboratory infrastructure across the country which will enable to quickly turnaround the sample test results.
As a leading manufacturer of a wide range of analytical instruments, Shimadzu works on development of new instruments and technologies, and provides comprehensive service support in order to keep up with changing demand. In addition to offering instrument, Shimadzu provides total support that includes the provision of information for food safety community, training workshops, seminars and instrument maintenance management.
The seminars concluded on an optimistic note on successful implementation need for adherence to FSSA as scheduled, where the food vendor registration and licensing is happening in full swing. Hopefully GoI will put higher emphasis on building up the food testing infrastructure to the scale needed.
