Food News

As announced in November, we asked our colleague Dr Frank Mörsberger (Business Development Food & Feed Analysis) to summarise his personal impressions of the 11th RAFA conference in Prague for you. Here is his report:

This year's ‘Recent Advances in Food Analysis’ conference was a meeting place for around 750 scientists from 41 countries. As always, the scientific programme was very dense, so that many lectures were presented in three parallel sessions. The choice was not easy. I therefore decided in favour of topics that are currently important for the AGROLAB GROUP and its food laboratories or could become a topic in routine analysis for our customers and us in the future.

Environmental and Process contaminants

Not surprisingly, the topic of PFAS (per- and polyfluorinated alkyl compounds) was dealt with in numerous presentations and posters. The analytical challenges here are the requirements for the sometimes very low limits of quantification demanded for these ubiquitous environmental contaminants as well as the short-chain and volatile compounds, which require special methods for determination. Solutions are offered on the one hand by high-resolution and unfortunately very expensive analysers in conjunction with special evaluation software and on the other hand by validated modifications of common sample preparation methods.

In the case of process contaminants, the focus was on mineral oil residues from the MOAH group (Mineral Oil Aromatic Hydrocarbons). On the one hand, because toxicity increases with the number of aromatic rings in the molecule and, on the other hand, because the profile allows conclusions to be drawn about possible sources of contamination. This task, in turn, can only be solved by coupled, multidimensional chromatography.

As you can imagine, these methods also use very expensive analysers, which also generate so many data sets in a single analysis run that only extremely powerful computers and sophisticated software can generate reliable results from the flood of data. This is also where the research fields of device-based residue analysis overlap with modern IT applications, machine learning and AI applications. This topic was therefore also a focus of this year's RAFA conference.

From the reports of the European reference laboratories and the closing presentation by Frans Verstraete as a high-ranking representative of the EU Commission and Deputy Director of DG SANTE (Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety), we received valuable information on what the official monitoring authorities in the EU will be dealing with in the coming years.

These are some of the topics on the list of the EU Commission and the EFSA (European Food Safety Agency):

• Natural toxins such as the group of quinolizidines (e.g. toxins from lupins)
• Mycotoxins, which have been rather rare in the past because they could pose an increased health risk for certain population groups in the future due to climatic changes and changing eating habits (veganism), such as Alternatia toxins, enniatins and deoxinivalenol (DON) metabolites.
• The group of plant lectins also requires further risk assessment.
• Process chemicals such as polychlorinated alkane compounds (PCA), including chlorinated paraffins (C10-C17) and naphthalenes, which cannot yet be analysed satisfactorily due to their sheer number and diversity - not least because there is a lack of reference standards and validated uniform methods.
• In addition to the well-known brominated flame retardants, which are considered to be poorly degradable in the environment, the related phosphorus-containing flame retardants will also be analysed.

Alternative protein sources

New protein sources such as insect meal, fungal mycelium and algae, which are increasingly being used as substitutes for animal products in food production, will pose new challenges to food safety, whether through new microbiological threats, previously unnoticed contaminants or new food allergies.

In all these topics, it was noticeable that the term ‘exposome’ appeared in many of the presentations. To summarise, it can be said that research is moving away from the previously prevailing assumption of linear causal relationships towards a complex consideration of mutually influencing mechanisms of action.

This involves investigating how the intake of various environmental pollutants, even in small quantities, can intensify (or cancel out) their effects in the body over the entire lifespan and to what extent there are also individual differences that are related, for example, to the human metabolome (i.e. the intestinal flora and metabolism). This research is also only possible thanks to global data collection, linking and new AI-based analysis algorithms.

Food Fraud

Last but not least, the topic of food adulteration and thus the authentication of raw materials and commercial products remains a field of research that has made great progress, but with every new detection method, the knowledge - and, it seems, the ambition - of counterfeiters to enrich themselves with new criminal tricks at the expense of the general public grows. The global damage caused by illegal practices in the area of food production is on a par with the income of the global drug cartels - albeit with a significantly lower risk of detection. This topic will also be discussed at the next RAFA conferences.

The next 12th RAFA will take place again in Prague from November 3rd to 6th, 2026.

Important progress in food analysis is being made in the international university environment and in the research departments of large food companies. At symposia such as RAFA, young scientists and ‘old hands’ exchange ideas and establish networks.

YOUR PLUS: AGROLAB sends experts to these congresses. We listen attentively and try to recognise at an early stage which analytical topics will occupy our customers and therefore us in the future, so that we are always a small step ahead in establishing methods suitable for routine use.

Author: Dr Frank Mörsberger, AGROLAB GROUP