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Food fraud, « adulteration » determination kits
Food Fraud is deliberate action of businesses or individuals to deceive others in regards to the integrity of food to gain undue advantage. Types of food fraud include but not limited to: adulteration, substitution, dilution, tampering, simulation, counterfeiting and misrepresentation.
Economically motivated adulteration is a subset of food fraud. It is the intentional substitution or addition of a substance in a product for the purpose of increasing the apparent value of the product or reducing the cost of its production, for economic gain.
The specific expertise of LIBIOS for the determination of some food frauds concerns 3 types of adulteration as: milk adulteration, adulteration by non durum wheat, adultération by melamine.
Milk adulteration
LIBIOS specialized in 2011 on the research for adulteration of milk.
First, adulteration by cow milk because this product is less expensive than goat or ewe milk, produced in bigger quantities and addition of milk is regulated at the European level.
LIBIOS proposes also tools to determinate the addition of goat milk in cow or ewe milk.
These diagnostic assay kits are based on two separate methods:
Analysis testing kit for durum wheat
LIBIOS also offers an immuno-enzymatic ELISA test which attracts food analysis laboratories and industries in food pasta/semolina products, because it quantifies the soft wheat eventually present in durum wheat.
French durum wheat is known for its content in plant proteins for producing, for instance, quality food pastas. Result: 75 % of French production is exported for constituting semolina and pasta base of producers in the world.
Wheat is generally classified into two main categories: durum wheat and common bread wheat. Apparent differences in physic-chemical as well as nutritional properties resulted into two distinctive commercial values.
Durum wheat, a distinctive tetraploid species, as it is clear from its meaning in Latin which means "hard", is referring to the hard wheat which makes its milling harder but when milled properly produces high-quality semolina flour with elevated quantities of gluten. The dough made with durum wheat flour has high ability to be extended or stretched out into long pieces without breaking, therefore are most suitable for production of pasta.
High-quality durum wheat is often substituted with the cheapest ingredients such as low-quality bread wheat to increase the profit margins is a clear example of economically motivated adulteration (EMA) which frequently reported globally.
Quality of pasta and semolina products depends on the quality of the used durum wheat.
European Union with close to 25% of global production is the biggest producer of durum wheat in the world.
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