Food adulteration

Ever since the horsemeat scandal, the awareness of food adulteration and food fraud has heavily increased.

The varying prices and availability of food products from different origin provide opportunities for the incorrect declaration of food components, both from a quality and quantity point of view. For example, horsemeat may be labelled as beef. Such product adulterations can be detected highly specifically and quantified relatively by means of a real-time PCR (providing e.g. percentage values of the respective animal species in relation to the total quantity of meat).

In addition, the interest in animal speciation in meat products is based on religious requirements (halal and kosher). Religiously motivated inspections, particularly of pork in meat products or processed foods, do not include any technical threshold values. This means that purely qualitative and particularly sensitive tests are required especially for detecting the presence of pork. Real-time PCR is a method of choice. The effective sensitivity of applied real-time PCR tests is based on the existence of intact DNA, making sensitive detection in heavily processed foods like gelatine difficult.

However, not only meat products are being adulterated. Food fraud is widespread in fish and dairy products, too. Click one of the following categories to find out more about adulteration of different foods.