Over the years awareness of food allergy has increased in the society due to its clear impact on public health. Today, most food manufacturers worldwide have implemented risk management strategies to control allergens during food production to minimize the risk of unintentional contamination of processed foods with allergenic ingredients. The effectiveness of these strategies is monitored with allergen testing methods in the manufacturing environment for raw materials and finished products. A big challenge for method developers of allergen testing technologies, is to determine what is an adequate limit of detection that is relevant to food processors. Ultimately, it is food processors who finally make critical decisions about the safety of a finished product before it is commercialized using data generated through allergen testing techniques. An important gap is the lack of established regulatory thresholds levels to define how much of an allergen is safe if present in a product. Today we are seeing advances in the application of risk assessment to add tools which intend to add health-risk information to analytical results enabling food processors to make more and consistent informed decisions based on data.  In this session we will review: a) available analytical methods to the food industry; b) the value of analytical methods as verification tools to assess allergen risk management strategies; c) current guidelines and recommendations related to thresholds for allergenic foods; and d) the use of the Voluntary Incidental Trace Allergen Labelling Program as a risk assessment tool which connects the use of analytical results and its impact to allergic population.

Allergen Testing: How much is too much?

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ACS Spring 2023

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