New two-step process detects food fraud
Marie Donlon | August 30, 2023To avoid global food fraud, researchers at Purdue University are employing a so-called food fingerprinting technique for distinguishing between foods made from the same ingredients but in different locations.
To avoid instances of what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) calls "economically motivated adulteration," wherein manufacturers substitute cheaper ingredients for more valuable ones — for instance, cutting olive oil with vegetable oil — the team has developed a patent-pending two-step process to prevent the alteration of food, which can happen anywhere along the global supply chain.
Source: Purdue University
The two-part process can reportedly reveal information about the chemical structure and atomic composition of a food sample, according to the Purdue team. To accomplish this, the team first employs a handheld Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) device. This device features high-powered lasers for creating minute plumes of plasma at the surface of a food sample. According to the researchers, the intensity of different wavelengths of light produced by the plasma reportedly reveals the type and proportion of elements making up the ingredients in the sample. Further, the LIBS device produces a unique digital spectrum, which, when paired with the machine-learning approach developed by the Purdue team, is transformed into a fingerprint for verifying the identity of the food in question.
To further verify the origin of complex foods, a second step was added to the process involving Raman spectroscopy for identifying specific organic molecules.
"In a sense, they form this complementary pair; what one cannot detect, the other can," the researchers explained. "LIBS gives you the amount of each atom, and Raman tells you how they are organized."
An article detailing the two-part process, Food contamination test using combined laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and Raman spectroscopy, appears in the journal Sensing for Agriculture and Food Quality and Safety XV.