Food fraud was estimated to cost the global food industry $10-15 billion per year. Various traceability and risk assessment systems have been developed to deter food fraud. With rapid globalization and complex supply chain, functions of those systems have been inevitably hindered. Serving as the last barrier to ensure food authenticity, reliable techniques to identify fraudulent foods are indispensable. Traditional techniques (e.g. liquid chromatography-based assays) are usually time consuming, labor-intensive, lack the sensitivity and/or specificity, or requiring sophisticated instruments. Therefore, the overall objective of my PhD thesis project is to validate the feasibility of spectroscopic techniques [i.e. Raman, mid-infrared, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopies] and advanced DNA amplification method [i.e. loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP)] to detect food fraud in a rapid, accurate, sensitive, selective, user-friendly, and/or instrumental-free manner. During my studies, an optimized protocol was developed to authenticate ground beef meat and identify and quantify the offal adulterants using mid-infrared spectroscopy-coupled with chemometric models, providing a limit of detection &lt;10% w/w of offal in ground beef meat. Solution NMR and solid-state NMR spectroscopies were confirmed to detect 6.7 and 128.6 mg/kg Sudan I in paprika powder in &lt;30 min with simple/no sample pretreatment, respectively. Besides, confocal micro-Raman and portable Raman spectroscopies were employed to recognize fish species and preliminary results demonstrated high potential of using Raman spectroscopy for fish species identification. In addition, LAMP has been confirmed to differentiate pomegranate juice from grape and apple juice and current studies are focusing on integrating the overall analysis onto a “sample-to-answer” polymer/paper-hybrid microfluidic “lab-on-a-chip” device. Techniques developed and to be developed in my studies can be generalized to authenticate many other food commodities and have the potential to be adopted by governmental laboratories, food industries and even consumers to rapidly authenticate food products, and thus better ensure the integrity of foods.

Development of innovative techniques for food authentication: The last barrier to prevent food fraud

255th National Meeting (2018)

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