Food authenticity

As the supply chains that deliver food stuffs to our doors grow ever more complex, bringing incredible choice to consumers, so it becomes more difficult to ensure that we can trust those foods. Stable isotope analysis is a technique which can verify food authenticity, detecting fraudulent food adulteration or mislabeling of premium and protected foods. Looking at the unique isotope signature can accurately determine the true origin of a food stuff, guaranteeing the safety of the public as well as the future of these specialist and traditional foods that deserve our protection. 

With the same stable isotope techniques the flavorings industry improves the protection of its products through multi-elemental isotopic fingerprinting to ensure that their products can be distinguished from their fraudulent counterparts. Stable isotope analysis can also be used to confirm the use of organic farming practices, or the addition of cheaper additives to a premium product, ultimately protecting both the consumer, and the reputation of genuine suppliers. 

Multi-elemental isotope analysis is able to bring a great deal of information about geographical origin and possible adulterations of premium food stuffs. Our BiovisION IRMS system for stable isotope analysis in food rapidly analyzes your samples and performs food authenticity testing in all different kinds of food stuffs, fruit pulp, vegetable matter, meat, seafood, bulk proteins, and olive oils. 

Wines command a great premium depending on their geographic origin, or appellation as more commonly known. Fruit juice with no added water is preferential to juice from concentrate. To verify food authenticity of wines and fruit juices, δ¹⁸O and δ²H isotope analysis allows the sample to be directly related to the origin thanks to the natural meteorological variation of the water in the source environment. Our iso FLOW system provides exceptional, high throughput analysis of these samples. 

Honey is one of the top five most globally adulterated food stuffs and stable isotope analysis can help to detect multiple forms of food adulteration in honey. Our BiovisION Honey IRMS system is a dedicated solution for the detection of C3 (beet, rice) and C4 (cane, HFCS) sugar adulteration of honey and complies with method AOAC 998.12 (“C-4 Plant Sugars in Honey”). BiovisION Honey is also ideal for investigating the geographical origin of honey using multi-elemental isotope analysis.