SCIEX summarizes 2016 food safety milestones and provides a peek into 2017 trends
The past few years have been tumultuous in the food industry. Unfortunate food safety incidents eroded consumer’s trust in the food supply chain, and we saw food governing bodies step up to implement new regulations and update old practices. The China milk scandal and the more recent meat scandals inevitably forced the hands of the authorities to start implementing changes to protect the economy and the people across Asia. Since 2015, countries like China, Singapore, and New Zealand have put in place new legislation to meet the challenges that the food industry presents. In order to meet the standards of new legislation being enforced, food testing laboratories have to adopt newer technology to ensure faster and more accurate results. Laboratories are investing in instrumentations and software tools that are able to help them meet new regulations and prepare for the future of food testing. It was observed in 2016 that there was an increased adoption of high resolution mass spectrometry techniques in food and environmental testing deployed for surveillance screening, dispute, and crisis management as it expands the scope of labs beyond targeted analysis. This workflow is starting to be adopted worldwide.
