“We strive to ensure food safety and accurate labels with our wide range of solutions”
From drug discovery and pharmaceutical development to food safety and environmental analysis, USheadquartered Phenomenex has developed chromatography solutions to equip researchers with the tools they require to improve global health and wellbeing. During an interaction with NuFFooDS Spectrum, S V Ganapathi, Managing Director, Phenomenex India, Hyderabad talks about how the company is contributing to the food testing ecosystem in India. Edited excerpts;
What is your contribution in strengthening food safety?
Food Adulteration is one of our primary focus points. We strive to support our food safety and quality organisations with tools and resources to ensure that our food is safe, and our food labels are accurate. Phenomenex India is committed to support the industry through a comprehensive product portfolio of sample preparation, chromatographic accessories along with strong application and method development guidance to meet food industry guidelines. Phenomenex is providing a wide range of solutions pertaining to food safety standards in India mainly in chromatography.
We have over 100 food applications using sample preparation, LC, LC/MS, GC, and GC/MS. Compound classes include: Contaminants, Mycotoxins, Pesticides Residues, Veterinary Drugs, Dietary Supplements, Fatty Acids, Organic Acids and Sugars and much more.
To support the food safety and testing applications we provide a broad range of products that include:
Sample Preparation- Quechers, Strata X, PRO, NOVUMS, DE, ION EXCHANGE CARTRIDGES
LC, LC/MS - Kinetex Biphenyl, Synergy Fusion RP, Gemini C18, KINETEX C18, LUNA C18
GC/MS – ZB-FAME, WAXPLUS, ZB-PAH EU, ZB-5MS, ZB-DIOXINS, ZB-MR1 MR2.
Are you planning to launch new products in India?
We recently added ZB-DIOXINS, ZB-PAH EU, Strata -PFAs,
Strata X PRO under our GC and Sample Preparation product portfolio. More than 90 per cent of human exposure to dioxins and dioxin-like substances is through food. With progressively lower regulatory limits and decreasing PCDD/F levels in food, feed, and tissues, more demanding limits of detection, selectivity, and robustness are necessary in a high-throughput lab. The gold-standard for analysis of PCDD/F and PCB is GC/HRMS. Laboratories involved with dioxin analysis must often deal with a variety of sample matrices. A key factor for these laboratories is maintaining instrument uptime, column robustness and maintaining resolution of critical pairs. We have various technical notes on our website with different sample matrices. Also, as we are aware Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) are carcinogenic substances that must be monitored in food products per guidelines. PAH compounds may arise in meat and dairy products upon heat processing, during which amino acid residues in food may react with sugars and creatine to generate PAHs. In addition, packaging materials in food may also introduce PAH components. It is essential to analyse these 4 PAHs in the shortest run time to improve the throughput of this analysis. We have products and solutions that can offer this.
How can we control the increasing incidences of food adulteration taking place in India?
Food Adulteration can be controlled by regular monitoring, inspection, and risk assessment of various ingredients, third party auditing and to develop Critical Analytical techniques. There are many newer and emerging trends in food technology that help in creating a digital, traceable, and safer food system. In food testing, technologies in terms of more updated systems LC-MS GCMS, HRMS, ICP will surely help the food industry to grow when you are having challenges in detection of low level/trace levels of toxic chemicals in food which is difficult by regular analytical systems.