Concerns have been raised about the safety of a smoke flavouring used in food manufacture, following evaluation by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
The EFSA’s studies have shown that in laboratory tests a smoke flavouring, FF-B, can be regarded as weakly genotoxic, that is causing genetic mutations and potential cancerous tumours, in animals. It has been now been withdrawn from use.
Liquid smoke flavourings are produced by controlled thermal degradation of wood in a limited supply of oxygen (pyrolysis), subsequent condensation of the vapours and fractionation of the resulting liquid products. Liquid smoke flavourings are derived from smoke condensates.
Presenting a paper on EFSA’s AFC panel in assuring the safety of flavouring substances to an EU Food Law conference in Brussels recently, professor Karl-Heinz Engel from the Technical University of Munich, who is vice chairman of the panel, said that of 16 smoke flavouring applications submitted for approval, one had proved invalid, two had been withdrawn, while one was concluded to be weakly genotoxic and had since been withdrawn. The others, he said, were “under construction”, with the panel awaiting data on these.
As a result of publication of the EFSA evaluation, the Food Standards Agency has consulted with stakeholders to establish the level of use of this product in the UK.
The FSA has received information from the European Commission which shows that FF-B constitutes less than 5% of the entire European smoke flavouring market and current data indicates that the level of usage, if any, in the UK is likely to be extremely low.
It claimed that from the information available, the risk to consumers from eating food containing smoke flavourings derived from FF-B is likely to be very small.
FF-B is mainly used in products with a short shelf-life and one manufacturer identified as using it replaced it with an alternative in April 2007. It has since recalled any FF-B that remained on the market.