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.
