An “untargeted” infrared (IR)-based approach to avoiding milk being adulterated is being developed, letting the dairy industry gain the advantage of detecting unknown adulterants.
Led by the International Dairy Federation (IDF), the cross-company scheme will have the ability of screening the milk for many adulterants as well as being able to detect unknown pollutants.
The case of milk being adulterated has become common in some countries such as China and India and is often done in order to increase the milk’s financial value by changing its composition.
A recent study from the Food Safety and Standrards Authority of India (FSSAI) indicated that there was a common practice where water was added to fresh milk before adding skimmed milk powder, glucose and fat in order to disguise the adulteration.
According to the FSSAI document, some products had been adulterated with detergent.
Caroline Leroux, the IDF communications specialist, said that this scheme would be suitable for all stages of the milk supply chain including before the beginning of the process.
She said: “It is a proactive approach to prevent adulteration of milk and identify further possible adulterants. This will help prevent health and food safety issues for consumers.
“The goal is to create an FTIR-based tool that can detect economic adulteration of milk supply with a range of known and currently unknown adulterants”.
She also said that Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometry (FTIR)-based methods are widely used to analyse liquid dairy products.
The ‘targeted’ approaches give specific but are unable to find new adulterants. On the other hand, ‘untargeted’ approaches – such as the IDF development – offer no particular information on the background of the adulteration but only the fact that there is a adulterant present.
Leroux added: “Traditional FTIR applications are quantitative – they ‘target’ specific compounds such as fat and protein. Based on experiments such calibrations can be constructed for a range of potential adulterants.
“An additional approach is to create qualitative calibrations to create ‘untargeted models’ capable of detecting an adulterant to a certain concentration”.
Leroux also said that the commercial trials are underway with ideas to commercialise the methods if tests are ‘conclusive’.
