Food Quality Magazine
ISSUE 01 | SUMMER 2014
Fingerprinting Food
Discovering the unknown unknowns
Sharon Palmer, PerkinElmer
Got milk? Maybe you have more
than you bargained for. Powdered
milk and high protein dairy products
are among the world’s most widely traded food commodities used
in a vast array of processed foods,
from baby formula and baked goods
to confectionary and high-protein
energy drinks. Sadly, they are also
favorite targets for economically motivated adulteration and mislabeling.
The higher the protein level, the more milk powder is worth. That has led
criminals to spike milk powder with a
disturbing array of ingredients, from
chalk dust, rice paste, and water
to nitrogen-rich agricultural and industrial chemicals meant to bolster
protein content and profits with no
apparent regard to the consequences. In 2008, one of these chemicals,
melamine, sickened thousands and
killed at least six infants in China
when it turned up in infant formula.
While that event sounded a global
alarm about the issue of adulteration, it did little to slow the pace of
new protein-based products being
introduced to the marketplace that
still contain ingredients of questionable origin. 1,2
The Rise in Regulation
Whether you are a local farmer or
a global supplier, safety and quality
in the $436 billion dairy industry
are the most essential ingredients
needed to earn the trust and confidence of the global marketplace.
The global dairy industry is heavily regulated to protect consumers
from adulterated and unsafe food
products, no matter what their origins. Despite vigilant and continuous
efforts to safeguard the integrity of
the global food supply, industry and
government officials are clearly concerned that they currently only look
for what they know. It is what they
do not know that keeps them up at
20
night. 3,4
That same worry concerns the U.S.
Pharmacopeial (USP) Convention,
a nonprofit scientific organization
that sets standards for the identity,
strength, quality, and purity of medicines, food ingredients, and dietary
supplements on a worldwide scale.
USP maintains a food fraud database
dating back to 1993. 5 The database
identifies dozens of adulterants
and hundreds of incidents that USP
scientists have uncovered involving
milk and milk-derived products over
the past 20 years. The global increase in economically-motivated adulteration has become so troublesome
that th