2011 Approaches for organic food and feed authentication

Summary

People’s growing awareness of health, environment and animal welfare has led to an increased public interest in the quality of foods and food production systems. This in turn boosted organic production. Due to higher production costs, organic produce tends to retail at a higher price than their conventional counterparts. As a consequence of the premium price, organic produce is susceptible to fraud. Fair competition between producers and sustained consumer confidence favour organic production, and it requires regular confirmatory assessments of the identity of organic produce in addition to administrative controls.
Traditional analytical strategies for guaranteeing quality and uncovering adulteration have relied on the determination of the amount of a marker compound or compounds in a material and a subsequent comparison of the value(s) obtained with those established for equivalent material. Authentication of organic produce is complex, and depends very much on the product examined. Therefore, it is unlikely to find a single marker that allows discrimination between organic and conventional produce in general. Even for a particular product, this approach is challenging. Selective fingerprinting, which involves analysis of a range of compounds which are considered potential discriminators, is the more promising approach. As these techniques result in a high number of variables the application of multivariate statistical methods greatly facilitate the evaluation of the data. In the presentation an overview on targeted single/multiple marker approaches will be provided, e.g. based on isotope ratio analysis, in addition to information on the fingerprint type of methodology. The various techniques will be illustrated with real-life examples for both food and feed.