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Quality Standards for Food Ingredients – an Essential Element to Fight Adulteration of Food
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Saturday, 01 May, 2010, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Markus Lipp and James C Griffiths
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Besides water, food is the second most essential need for all humans. Furthermore, in most countries the food industry constitutes a significant, if not major contribution to the local economy. Other than raw agricultural commodities, food typically is comprised of several constituents amongst which are food additives that are added not for nutritional purposes but for their desired function in the final food (e.g., emulsifier). As different regions and countries differ in their definition for “food additives”, in this paper the word food ingredients is used to describe all elements that are mixed together at various stages during the production process to produce the desired final product. Hence, for this manuscript, food ingredients will include substances added for technological purposes (e.g., thickener), for nutritional purposes (e.g., oils) or any other purpose with the food ingredient still being present in the final food (with or without having a function in the final food).
The industrialization of countries causes also an increase in urbanization as more and more people live in or near cities without adequate space to grow sufficient food locally. Consequently, more and more consumers have to purchase their food and thus requiring a more extensive infrastructure to deliver the necessary goods, increasing the need to process foods to achieve the shelf life needed for transportation. Therefore, food supply chains become more complex, more fractured, and more complicated and opaque. Furthermore, to accommodate modern life styles, food that still has good organoleptic properties and is easy to prepare seems to dominate more and more the shelf space in supermarkets. This is made possible by food manufacturers processing raw food and adding ingredients for flavor, texture and shelf life to achieve the desired outcome at a price still attractive to consumers.
Raw materials for food production are often sourced from various places around the world to obtain the lowest prices and a year-round availability. The competitive nature of the food industry may also require combining numerous food ingredients to realize the desired flavor, texture and functionality increasing further to the complexity of the supply chain.
Consumers will naturally be attracted to low-cost items that purport the same quality and functionality as a similar but higher priced item. In such a price-driven environment, it appears to become essential to establish criteria for the identity, quality and purity of food ingredients to help avoid economically motivated adulteration. Economically motivated adulteration is here defined1 as the fraudulent, intentional substitution or addition of a substance in a product for the purpose of increasing the apparent value of the product or reducing the cost of its production, i.e., for economic gain. Economically motivated adulteration includes dilution of products with increased quantities of an already present substance (e.g., watering down of juice), as well as the addition or substitution of substances in order to mask dilution, substitution or addition of non-genuine material to genuine material without the knowledge of the purchaser.
In order to address the need for minimum criteria for identity, quality and purity for food ingredients, various organizations developed standards for food ingredients (e.g., Codex Alimentarius, ISO). These standards may be issued through governmental and non-governmental organizations and are voluntary or mandatory, depending on the regulatory authority of the issuing authority. As their common denominator, however, all these standards provide the opportunity to assess whether a food ingredient conforms to a particular standard. This serves as a central anchor, as a manufacturer can demonstrate conformity of its materials produced, the purchaser can rest assured that the purchased materials conforms to the standard most suitable to their needs, and third parties, independent of manufacturer and sellers, can also verify any claims made by other parties in the supply chain.
Numerous organizations are offering standards for the one or other segments of the food industry, such as trade associations, professional organizations, governmental authorities and others. The Food Chemical Codex (FCC), as published by the United States Pharmacopeia, however, has a special place among all these organizations, as none other has the breadth of the FCC:
● The FCC accommodates all food ingredients that can legally be added to food anywhere in the world.
● FCC offers the quality standards developed through a scientific process that is open to the public,
● FCC also develops and offers the corresponding analytical reference materials.
The combination of quality criteria, suitable analytical methods and authentic reference materials offers all parties the advantage to not only agree on science-based identity, quality and purity criteria, but also to be able to run a side-by-side comparison of the material under consideration and the authentic reference material available from the United States Pharmacopeia (USP). The FCC offers a complete package to determine to the conformity of a food ingredient and, if the results confirm, both seller and purchaser can be confident that they added a critical step to increase the safety of food by verifying the food ingredient(s)’ authenticity.
A FCC monograph is a set of quality criteria and such criteria are critical guarantee the identity and, thus, to ensure safety of food ingredients. In most countries, food ingredients have to pass a safety review, before they can be legally added to food. Naturally, during this safety review, only the authentic material is regarded. Any adulteration, any changes to the quality, purity and authenticity of a food ingredient without the knowledge of the purchaser, will results in an ingredient whose identity is essentially unknown and hence, does not conform to the legal authorization of the material it purports to be. Even more critical, any adulteration can easily result in a health hazard, as was the case by the adulteration of Chinese dairy products with melamine. Whether adulteration leads to products that are dangerous for the consumer will depend exclusively on the adulterer’s knowledge and ethical boundaries. For example, the misbranding of food regarding its geographical origin or the dilution of food with water (e.g., fruit juice) may not pose a health hazard, but defrauds the consumer economically. The substitution of an ingredient with any other material, performed without the knowledge of the purchaser, poses a multitude of risks completely unknown to anyone but the adulterer, including potential allergic reaction from the adulterant or the addition of toxic substances to an otherwise safe food ingredient (e.g., melamine in dairy products, sudan red to spices).
Once the authenticity of a food ingredient is violated, its identity is altered, and a safety evaluation for the food ingredient it purports to be does not apply anymore. The identity of the food ingredient has changed and become unknown (the adulteration occurred without the knowledge of the purchaser), bypassing all safety reviews. Exactly here play internationally accepted, science-based quality standards a critical role in establishing and confirming the authenticity, identity, quality and purity of a food ingredient. Having such a confirmed identity provides the foundation of all further risk assessment and risk management procedures for this food ingredient and all foods manufactured using such an ingredient and, thus, is at the very core of all food safety systems.
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