THE FIRST PORTABLE MASS SPECTROMETER DEVICE FOR RAPID, ON-SITE FOOD CONTAMINANT TESTING

Project Information

SAFE-FOOD

Grant agreement ID: 190107075

DOI

10.3030/190107075

Project closed

EC signature date 16 June 2022

Start date 1 April 2022

End date 31 March 2024

Funded under

• The European Innovation Council (EIC)

Total cost

€ 2 280 212,75

EU contribution

€ 1 596 148,93

Coordinated by

NEXT GENERATION SENSORS BV
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SAFE-FOOD (THE FIRST PORTABLE MASS SPECTROMETER DEVICE FOR RAPID, ON-SITE FOOD CONTAMINANT TESTING)

Reporting period: 2023-04-01 to 2024-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

To ensure that the food is safe before entering the store, food contaminations (pesticide, toxins, bacteria, and antibiotics) are monitored during food processing: random samples from large batches of food are sent to independent laboratories for testing. Testing takes several days while in parallel food production and processing continues. As a result, large batches of already processed food are destroyed in case contaminants are detected. This is an awful waste of resources in terms of money, time, and ingredients. Also, the delayed identification of food contaminations causes a potential health risk to consumers when unsafe food products reach distribution centres and supermarkets. The estimated cost of food safety incidents for the European economy is around €143 billion per year. As such, there is a huge demand for solutions that can reliably assess contaminations at the source and in real-time, thereby effectively reducing food waste and improving food safety.


NG Sensors has established the minimum viable product MVP for its Handheld Molecular Contaminant Screener (HMCS) that 'brings the lab to the food samples' (rather than the samples to the lab). HMCS is an innovative, low weight, sensitive, easy to use, fully cloud-integrated portable MS that allows food companies to screen for contaminants, in real-time, at the source without time delay. HMCS can be run by non-experts as it provides a user-friendly software interface showing the results with a simple red/green light. Testing cost is lower than conventional lab-based testing and does not require sample preparation and allows to trace contaminations to the source.

Within this project, we have developed MVP of HMCS and we are demonstrating the HMCS ability through infield pilot studies to detect trace amounts of contaminant with industry leaders in agrifood along with HMCS manufacturing scale-up for large-scale market.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

After the Alpha prototype was established in 2020, and the first proof of concept was validated; NGS established a road map to further develop the Alpha version, for a future commercialisation. For that, we start our work to produce the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that fits the market requirements within the SAFE-FOOD project. The design, development and optimization of the MVP device, were carried out on the hardware as well as the software system level.

The starting point of this optimization was the small scale pilot studies we carried out with our field partners, as a part of test-built-test cycle. The process consisted of taking in consideration the problems and the feedbacks we received from the partners we carried the pilot studies.

As a result we sucessfully developed and deployed MVP devices for in-depth field pilot (validation) studies with major food companies in markets such as olive production, sea food contaminant testing and fraud detection between bio and non bio farmed crops.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Problem's with the current state of the art:

Current state of art detection methods used by food companies, farmers and regulatory bodies for agrifood diagnostics are laboratory based which means the sample must be transported to the lab. This procedure is:
Time consuming (3-10 days)
Expensive (€ 100-200/hour)
It has challenges with respect to logistics. Most of these testing is done by food companies at the food processing stages i.e. after collection of food from the farm. Moreover, upon positive detection of contaminants at processing or distribution stage of the food chain, the lots of food must be withdrawn from distribution centers and in some cases even from supermarkets which further results in massive loss of money, time and food wastage resulting in increased carbon footprint.

HMCS goes beyond state of the art by bringing the lab to the sample with an extremely sensitive and rapid detection portable mass spectrometer (MS) capable of measuring:

A select number of measuring points (e.g. different processing stages of the food value chain)
Rapid (< 1 min) detection of risk related substances at different measuring points
Detection down to trace levels of target contaminants (part per billion – ppb)
Non-technical user: green and red-light methodology
Unambiguously results - no further interpretation of the data needed – limited ‘false-positives’

HMCS MVP device deployed for olive production process monitoring