Earlier this month, the UK government announced that a new crime unit designed to fight food fraud will be put in place. The announcement was made in response to the publication of a government-commissioned report on the horsemeat scandal, which shook the meat supply chain last year when horse and other meats being passed off as beef were detected in a range of processed foods.

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The severity of the issue came to light later in the year when many ground beef products across Europe were found to contain horse meat. Some "beef" samples were as much as 100 percent equine, testing showed. Food industry leaders have attributed the wide-scale problem to organized crime, though food policy experts have said the scandal was an inevitability, brought about by shifting, adversarial supply chains and laissez-faire corporate governance of food safety.  

Meanwhile, scientists in Germany have developed a technique for detecting meat adulteration. The scientists published their research in the American Chemistry Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry this week.

Hans-Ulrich Humpf and colleagues said food fraud is a major global economic problem. The UK government's Elliott review estimated that food crime is widespread, as criminals are attracted by the low risks and relatively high payoffs.

Professor Humpf and co. also pointed out that adding horse or pork to other meats without disclosure can violate ethical standards and religious practices. This was discovered to be the case with certain foods supplied to prisons in the UK last year; at the height of the horsemeat scandal, pastry goods labelled as Halal were found to contain pig DNA.

Although food scientists and regulators have methods at their disposal to help root out such fraudulent practices, Humpf said these techniques occasionally yield false results, cannot detect more than one kind of adulterant or are ineffective at testing some highly processed foods, such as sausages.

The Professor elaborated, "The current praxis is using PCR and ELISA method. These biochemical methods are also sensitive. However they have some disadvantages as they can cause problems with highly processed samples. Furthermore you can usually only detect one species at the same time."

To address these problems, Humpf, along with Christoph von Bargen and Jens Brockmeyer, took another approach, building on the recent introduction of mass spectrometry (an analytical chemistry technique) for meat authentication.

The researchers said their new technique as a rapid and simple method for extracting and analysing proteins from processed food. When tested, they found it was sensitive enough to reliably detect as little as 0.24 percent horse or pork meat even in highly processed beef samples.

Professor Humpf said, "Our new approach is using mass spectrometry and with this technique… we can analyze processed samples and we can analyze different species at the same time [including] beef, horse, pork, chicken, lamb."

The food chemistry professor added that the method is ready to use. He said, "Our method can be used by each laboratory and there are just a few adaptations needed. However this is always the case if a food laboratory is using a new method. More work is only needed to include further species; wild animals, for example."