For food and nutraceutical producers, nothing is more important than ensuring the safety and consistency of their products. However, economic adulteration can result in the introduction of inferior or dangerous ingredients that can compromise consumer health and hurt brand trust.
Swift and easy raw ingredient authenticity testing is essential to maintain production line throughput, safeguard consumers and protect against potential food threats.
This guide outlines the latest in Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) technology for superior adulterant detection and confident quality assurance testing.
Download this brochure to discover:
- Key ingredients that commonly face adulteration
- Simple, customizable quantification workflows that can be performed without technical expertise
- Solutions with powerful data visualization capabilities for confident ingredient analyses
A SIMPLE RECIPE
FOR FOOD SAFETY
AND QUALITY
Adulterant Screen Solutions
YOUR MOST IMPORTANT
INGREDIENT IS
PEACE OF MIND
3
THE CONFIDENCE
THAT COMES FROM
SAFETY AND
AUTHENTICITY
For food and nutraceuticals producers, nothing is as
important as your brand. And to protect it, you need
to know that the ingredients in your food products are
nutritious, safe, and authentic.
But with the cost of raw ingredients steadily increasing,
the temptations of economic adulteration can be strong.
Some adulterants – rice syrup in honey, apple juice in
pomegranate juice, lower grade olive oils masquerading
as extra virgin – simply make for an inferior end product.
But others – ethylene glycol in cough syrup, urea in milk
powders, even melamine in candies – can be downright
dangerous. And these substances and more can find
their way into the food products and nutraceuticals your
customers rely on every day.
That’s what Adulterant Screen™ based solutions are
designed to prevent.
With Adulterant Screen software on our FT-IR and
NIR systems, everyone in your lab can easily add
extra safeguards and perform pass/fail screening for
adulterants and authenticity, with no sample preparation
and no scientific background required, in a minute or
less. Setup is simple, too, with customizable workflows
and powerful results visualization features that you can
add to your existing materials verification processes. And
it works alongside the nutritional parameters you may be
already testing for.
Adulterant Screen solutions: Helping you guard against
the next major food threat. And the next.
Protecting the Food Supply,
One Ingredient at a Time
Liquid milk
Economic adulteration can be underhanded (cane
sugar) or actually dangerous (urea). Testing can help
ensure your milk is pure and healthful.
Powdered milk
Saying the word “melamine” can strike fear in food
producers everywhere – but there are scores of other
ways powdered milk can be contaminated. So your
solution needs to deal with known and unknown threats.
Olive oil
Hazelnut oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, corn oil,
rapeseed oil, even olive pomace oil can be added to extra
virgin olive oil – and can pass some routine screenings.
Honey
Is it pure honey, or has it been “sweetened” by adding
high-fructose corn syrup or rice syrup? High-sensitivity
screening can help you test for purity.
Spices
When you’re paying for pure Italian saffron, you can’t
settle for inferior product dyed with Sudan Red.
Adulterant Screen can help prevent suppliers from using
dyes to intensify color.
Maple syrup
It’s a luxury product, and you pay for purity. But
maple syrup can be adulterated with other relatively
inexpensive sugars to boost sweetness – and profits.
Nutraceuticals
A product recall can shake the public’s confidence in an
emerging market, so producers are verifying ingredient
purity and integrity through cost-effective, highly
reliable FT-IR solutions.
4
WHO KNEW SCREENING
FOR ECONOMIC
ADULTERANTS
COULD BE THIS SIMPLE?
Targets the knowns, screens for everything else
Most food producers are concerned about particular adulterants in
their ID verification testing. In addition to detecting abnormalities
in routine identity confirmation, Adulterant Screen software can
detect both targeted and nontargeted threats with statistical
probabilities and semiquantitative amount estimates.
It allows you to identify targeted adulterants with utmost sensitivity.
Using a principal components model to handle spectral variability of
acceptable samples, Adulterant Screen software gives fewer false
negatives – and a high degree of confidence in your results. Plus,
proprietary statistical residuals analysis detects relevant abnormal
spectral components that could be due to adulterants.
The simple way to test for all your parameters
With Adulterant Screen, you can detect for known and unknown
adulterants right alongside your normal materials verification and
quantitative measurements – and that goes a long way toward
increasing confidence in your ingredients’ purity and authenticity. All
you need are spectra of pure materials and any pure threat you want
to target – the software builds the model that includes acceptable
batch-to-batch variability and is sensitive to the targeted threat.
Adulterant Screen takes a novel approach to adulterant detection, with sophisticated algorithms that combine chemometric
modeling and residuals analysis to detect both targeted and nontargeted economic adulterants. And it does it with high
sensitivity – and without costly quantitative calibration development.
What’s more, it’s an approach that prepares you for tomorrow’s threats through simple system updates that sensitize the
Adulterant Screen system to suspected adulterants – so you’re always prepared for the next big adulteration threat.
Create Adulterant Screen methods to run from standard instrument software
or include as separate executable routines
Incorporate adulterant screening alongside existing quantitative and
ID protocols
5
Method development made easy
Methods are easily run on basic instrumentation software, while the
Spectrum™ Touch interface can guide everyone in your lab through
the procedures. And they can be easily combined with other standard
materials identification methods or quantitative analysis to produce
comprehensive, consolidated reports on threat levels.
You can also easily define your own workflow with easy-to-follow
instructions using our Spectrum Workflow Developer module. The
software uses Spectrum Touch to provide a powerful tool for faster,
simpler, and more complete workflow development. The result is
optimized workflows and shorter timelines for implementation and
transfer of IR and NIR methods. When a new threat emerges, you can
update your method to be sensitive to it – with no coding required.
Results the way you want to see them
Adulterant Screen lets you see levels of detected adulterants, along
with statistical estimates. Semiquantitative concentration estimates
are provided without having to do quantitative development – so
you can detect levels without complex individual calibrations.
When combined with TIBCO Spotfire® software, you have the tools
to visualize batch trends and abnormal batches, and relate your
results to other metadata such as supplier information, for much
better threat preparedness.
Spectrum Touch software
View results trending or drill-down for additional information with
TIBCO Spotfire® results dashboards
6
IT’S A PLATFORM THAT’S
BUILT ON TRUST
To discern the widest range of adulterants, Adulterant Screen software
runs on our complete line of highly sensitive, easy-to-operate FT-IR and NIR
systems. Screening for known and unknown adulterants can be challenging,
because of the need to identify minor spectral dissimilarities in very complex
spectra. So for best results, you need a stable spectrometer platform
combined with software and methodologies that are optimized with your
specific products in mind.
Best-in-class hardware and innovative, intuitive software designed for
ingredient screening across the supply-chain-integrity landscape: That’s what
sets Adulterant Screen on our FT-IR and NIR systems apart from the rest.
7
Spectrum Two: Infrared that goes wherever the
adulterants are
Simple yet powerful, compact and rugged: The Spectrum Two™
system is the spectrometer of choice for everyday screening,
inside and outside the lab setting. It breaks new ground in
operational simplicity, combining outstanding performance with
low-maintenance design, and it's spectral quality and analytical
performance are perfect for a wide variety of applications –
from raw materials identification to analysis of formulated food
and nutraceuticals products. And its unique OpticsGuard™
humidity shield protects the instrument from the effects of harsh
environments, with long-life desiccant for maximum uptime.
Frontier: Superior detection – today and tomorrow
Our powerful and adaptable Frontier™ system meets all your
biggest detection challenges today – and is flexible and
expandable enough to meet the next big food fraud threat. With
automated range switching, mid-, near-, and far-IR techniques
are readily available. And with excellent signal-to-noise ratio and
photometric performance, you get optimal spectral performance
and sensitivity – a configurable platform that delivers dependable,
consistent, trouble-free operation.
Tailored for whatever work you do
With exceptional signal-to-noise ratio, advanced electronics, and optimized sensitivity, the Spectrum Two and Frontier systems ensure
superior spectra – no matter what the adulterant you’re screening for. What’s more, these systems deliver a host of other highperformance features and sampling accessories, including:
Spectrum Two Frontier
• Single-reflection ATR accessory designed for mid-IR, enabling
highly reproducible analysis of solids, liquids, and pastes –
with no sample preparation required. (Also can withstand
repetitive cleaning and is scratch-resistant, even with highly
abrasive samples.)
• Innovative NIRA2 NIR reflectance accessory (for the Frontier
system), delivering ultimate spectral fidelity with samplespinner options for inhomogeneous or granular materials
• Fixed-mirror-pair interferometer that requires no dynamic
alignment, along with a simple, noncritical bearing for
unmatched longevity and reliability
• Atmospheric Vapor Compensation™ technology with advanced
digital-filtering algorithm to compensate for CO2
and water
absorptions in real time – with no purging
• Absolute Virtual Instrument™ with gas-phase spectra for
accurate calibration – data can be transferred precisely
between instruments, wherever they’re located
• No-compromise optical design for exceptional sensitivity
• Built-in intelligence to control and monitor measurements and
alert for potential errors
• Precision-engineered, zero-alignment sampling accessories to
reduce measurement inconsistencies
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940 Winter Street
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