Prevention of food fraud and economically motivated adulteration present a significant challenge to industry and regulatory agencies. As illustrated by melamine adulteration of dairy products in China and horse meat adulteration of ground beef in the EU, large-scale food fraud incidents can result in catastrophic health consequences, widespread recalls, and brand damage. The Food Safety Modernization Act will require additional control efforts by industry aimed at food fraud. However, since food fraud is an intentional act, traditional food safety and quality approaches to assessment and mitigation are not sufficient. This session will present recent developments in the area of food fraud prevention and mitigation. USP has developed a framework to help industry and regulators develop their own systems to assess and mitigate food fraud vulnerabilities. This session will outline USP’s proposed food fraud vulnerability Guidance chapter. Conventional Raman spectroscopy is widely used as a research tool in food-science laboratories, but is not typically used for routine applications within the food industry. This session will describe a standoff Raman technique for detecting food fraud-related adulterants in edible oils, milk, and flour, and its potential for use by the food industry. While multiple reports have cited the sale of mislabeled fish species at retail, little information has been provided about the supply chain for these seafood products and the location of the substitution. This session will address the results of a study to determine the prevalence of substitution in three fish species at retail in Minnesota and to describe the supply chains for these products. Finally, this session will describe a tool-box of methods under development aimed at discriminating authentic skim milk powders from those that have been adulterated with both known and unknown adulterants.  Some of the tools being explored represent a new paradigm for verifying food ingredient integrity.

Presentations