A new EU-funded project has been launched in a bid to harmonise analytical methods for monitoring food quality and safety across Europe and beyond.
Dubbed MoniQA (Monitoring and Quality Assurance in the food supply chain), the e12M project will develop common strategies for harmonising and validating detection methods and technologies to set new standards in quality and safety.
Project partners will create a virtual laboratory to outline details of food safety issues and food testing and analysis methods in use. Through this, researchers could exchange data, developing common strategies that could inform new standards, said Martin Rose at York's Central Science Laboratory (CSL), which is co-ordinating the joint research part of MoniQA.
The project could form the basis of a network of food safety and quality experts, which would last long after the initial project had ended, said Rose.
He added: “Different countries all do things in a different way, especially new entrants to the EU from central and eastern Europe. But you also get variations more locally. For example, during the Sudan 1 incident, some people used LCUV [liquid chromatography ultraviolet] techniques and others used mass spectrometry, with differing results.”
In the US, food safety regulation was typically method-specific - in that legislators stipulated what testing and monitoring methods should be used, he said. In Europe, by contrast, regulations were typically criteria-specific, he said. “Often this might necessitate the use of a particular method, but not necessarily. It’s less prescriptive.”
CSL was looking at issues such as technology development and application, validation and standardisation of analytical methods and design and use of reference materials.
Knowledge and experience exchange, leading to harmonised strategies for hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) systems, economics and environment were other areas being explored, said Rose.
For more details, log on to http://www.moniqa.org