User:Shawndouglas/sandbox/sublevel6

Title: What types of testing occur within a food and beverage laboratory?

Author for citation: Shawn E. Douglas

License for content: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Publication date: August 2022

Introduction

The food and beverage laboratory plays a vital role in helping improve and secure our food supply and the consumable products that get made from it. It does this by playing a number of roles within the overall food and beverage industry, including within the research and development (R&D), pre-manufacturing and manufacturing, and post-production regulation and security phases of food and beverage production.^[1] It's within these roles a multi-discipline approach to testing occurs, depending on the role played by the lab. However, regardless of role, all testing boils down to a means of better ensuring safer, more nutritious and delicious foods and beverages.

This brief topical article will borrow from previous discussion about food and beverage laboratories^[1] and dive deeper into the types of testing taking place within the three primary roles such labs have within the industry.

Broad testing within the industry

Food and beverage laboratories tap into numerous scientific disciplines for the work they do. Among the various roles these labs serve, disciplines such as biochemistry, biotechnology, chemical engineering, chemistry, fermentation science, materials science, microbiology, molecular gastronomy, and nutrition and food science are applied.^[2]^[3]^[4] As such, a diverse skillset may at times be required by the food and beverage scientist, with not only hard skills in microbiology, biochemistry, and fermentation, but also the flexibility and nimbleness to apply those skills to a rapidly changing consumer dynamic.^[5]

Although slightly dated, past surveys of food processors have largely shown a majority of testing occurring within the processor facility, though with outsourcing to a third-party lab becoming a growing trend. A 2013 Advantage Business Media survey of food processors "found 32.5 percent use both in-house and outside labs; 28.9 percent use only in-house testing, and 24.1 percent send samples only to outside labs," with 14.5 percent saying they didn’t require testing.^[6] A 2017 survey by Strategic Consulting, Inc. and published in Food Safety Magazine saw the number of labs sending samples only to outside labs increase compared to the 2013 survey, with 28% of respondents saying they outsourced all samples.^[7] Similar surveys in 2020 reinforced the view that outsourcing was a growing trend, with more non-pathogen testing getting outsourced along with pathogen testing.^[8]^[9]

This increase may not be surprising given reports that third-party contract testing laboratories were increasingly being used for food quality and safety testing. A 2013 Strategic Consulting, Inc. report cited the rise in third-party labs was "in response to the growing complexity, cost, and volume of testing required by food producers and retailers."^[10] Another concern that may be driving outsourcing of at least microbial laboratory testing is regulatory pressure concerning pathogenic organisms in the production facility, and by extension out of the internally housed lab, though there may be a strong preference to contract with third-party labs in close proximity to the plant to better ensure desired turnaround times.^[7] However, veterans in the food and beverage industry may view such outsourcing concerns as minimal, particularly when a facilities processes and quality mechanisms are appropriately reviewed, maintained, and enforced.^[7]

In regards to what kind of testing has historically been occurring in the industry, we turn back to that 2013 Advantage Business Media survey. Additional statistics from that survey revealed that 70.6 percent of respondents were testing for quality, 57.7 percent were testing for consistency, and 56.5 percent were conducting food safety tests for pathogens. Some 29.4 percent were testing for packaging accuracy claims, and 23.5 percent were testing for the presence of reported and unreported allergens. More recent survey data is difficult to find, so it's not clear how these numbers compare to the realities of 2022. We can say that at least as of 2020, pathogen testing remained vital, with testing of Listeria proving a fast-growing subcategory of pathogen testing, primarily for environmental monitoring of the production facility.^[8]^[9] A 2020 survey by Strategic Consulting, Inc. further indicated that the volume of microbiology testing is growing at roughly five percent, while pathogen testing volume is growing at roughly six to seven percent, adding that "outsourcing is driving the volume of tests being sent to commercial labs by as much as 10 percent."^[9] The same surveyor increased those percentages the following year.^[11]

Finally, Strategic Consulting's Bob Ferguson added that polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is seeing an uptick in food and beverage testing as of 2021^[12]:

As processors outsource their samples, PCR seems to be more frequently selected as the analytical method used than it was when the samples were analyzed in-plant. This possibility certainly makes sense. PCR requires expensive instrumentation and technical expertise to analyze samples properly. Every commercial lab will have a level of analyst capabilities and infrastructure that allows them to use PCR. Commercial labs will also have a high incentive to recommend the use of PCR to optimize the throughput of their instruments.

Testing within the primary roles of a food and beverage lab

The type of testing occurring within a food and beverage lab will vary depending on the role it plays within the larger framework of industry needs. The following subsections examine the three primary roles of these labs and the testing required to meet their goals.

R&D roles

The laboratory participating in this role is performing one or more tasks that relate to the development or improvement of a food, beverage, additive, or spice. It may even conduct testing slightly outside its typical purvey, as with the conjunction of materials science with food bioengineering. The following types of activities within R&D will typically involve some level of laboratory participation.

Overall food innovation and development: International Center for Food Chain and Network Research's Schiefer and Deiters note that the food and beverage industry as a whole faces a number of significant challenges today, including economic and noneconomic changes, consumer lifestyle changes, global increases in food consumption, degradation and loss of cropland, and societal changes to attitudes concerning sustainability.^[13] These types of challenges require a food and beverage industry that is more agile and innovative, as in making impactful breakthroughs to improve the quality and range of products, increase the capacity for making products, replace outdated products, develop more flexible or sustainable processes, and improve health and safety.^[14] Given the broad scope of efforts involved, the laboratory services for such impactful R&D efforts can vary widely depending on the goal. Improving the flavor of plant-based meat substitutes, for example, comes with somewhat different analytical techniques and disciplinary requirements than say improving the three-dimensional food printing of said meat substitutes.^[15]

Aroma/flavor analysis and formulation: Here the concept of "sensomic" study, an approach to describing the sensory properties of foodstuffs at a molecular level^[16], plays an increasingly important role.^[16]^[17] This involves analytical techniques such as gas chromatography, liquid chromatography, and spectrophotometry, used in conjunction with chemometric data analysis to isolate and act upon volatile compounds from one or more samples.^[16]^[17]^[18] Aroma tends to be a more difficult concept to tackle as we've identified more than a 1,000 volatile compounds in some substances such as cooked meats and coffees (though typically only a small number of those compounds make a significant contribution to the overall perceived aroma^[18]), which in turn add further complexity to overall perception of flavor.^[17] This gives laboratory researchers formulating a product for a distinct flavor profile more than a few challenges in, for example, putting together a successful mapping of chemical composition to flavor perception.^[19]

Genetic modification for improved yields and nutrition: The preface of Westin Carrillo's book Biotechnology and Food Production summarizes this activity well. "Biotechnology can be used in many ways to achieve higher yields; for example by improving flowering capacity and increasing photosynthesis or the intake of nutritive elements," he says. "In the long term, genetic engineering will also help to increase production of the most valuable components of specific crops" like cassava and rice, as well as modify their amino acid composition in order to increase their otherwise deficient nutritional value.^[20] As this suggests, however, knowledge and skills in genetic analysis, modification, and expression is required, in turn requiring the equipment and skill for genetic sequencing, microbial transformation, genetic use restriction technology (GURT), Northern or Western blotting, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), etc.^[20] Admittedly, this type of R&D may fall more firmly in the hands of agriculture businesses than food and beverage businesses themselves. However, a few food and beverage business may in-house their genetic modification R&D efforts as an overall effort to improve a majority of its products.