Instrument Firms Respond to Food Events

Analytical instrument companies are an important component of the food safety–response chain when the presence of a contaminant is detected. How these companies respond to such an event not only helps to ensure food safety but benefits business as well.

In January, instrument companies issued or publicized methods to test for the fungicide carbendazim in orange juice. Late last year, Coca-Cola, which markets Minute Maid and Simply Orange juices, discovered the presence of carbendazim in orange juice imported from Brazil and Canada, by way of Brazil. Coca-Cola alerted the FDA, which placed a hold on orange juice shipments to test for the fungicide beginning January 4. The testing process in this case generally took four to five days if no carbendazim is detected and an additional week if trace amounts are found. On January 9, the FDA announced it would reject all orange juice shipments that showed 10 ppb of carbendazim or higher. Carbendazim is prohibited under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and, therefore, is considered “zero tolerance,” but a limit of 10 ppb is typical for banned contaminants because of feasibility. On January 18, the FDA announced that the amounts of carbendazim in the shipments did not pose a safety threat but stated that it would continue to test for it and refuse tainted shipments above 10 ppb. As of February 9, the FDA had found 23 orange juice samples each containing up to 36 ppb of carbendazim, including 12 from Brazil and 11 from Canada.

Even though the FDA ultimately found no health risk with this food safety event, the incident is expected to spur changes in food testing, according to instrument companies. “There’s going to be a lot of imported orange juice samples being tested for carbendazim,” said Lauryn Bailey, global marketing manager for Food and Environmental Markets at AB SCIEX. “We’re going to start seeing a lot more screening of food samples in general because you just never know when something else is going to be the next misused pesticide and what’s going to be the next concern.” This event may serve as a cautionary lesson for food companies. “The urgency [of the event] was that any time you find something you don’t expect, it escalates the importance of it because it impacts the brand more than it impacts public health in most cases, because it is a chemical contaminant of very trace levels,” said Paul Zavitsanos, Global Food Safety manager at Agilent. “But what it also does is say, ‘well, your surveillance program may not be perfect—you almost missed this. So, if you almost missed this, what else is it that you may be missing that may show up in the future and impact both brand and human health?’”

There are various LC/MS/MS approaches to testing for carbendazim in orange juice, all of which can detect levels lower than the FDA’s limit of 10 ppb. AB SCIEX and Phenomenex, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Waters issued new methods for carbendazim testing in orange juice as a result of the event. Agilent did not issue a new method specifically for carbendazim detection in orange juice, as it already had a method for general pesticide screening in fruit juice. This method employs the company’s 1200 HPLC and 6410 triple quadrupole MS and uses the QuEChERS (quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, safe) method with automated solid-phase extraction for cleanup. QuEChERS is AOAC Official Method 2007.01. Thermo’s method uses its multichannel UHPLC Transcend TLX system and a triple quadrupole MS, the company’s TSQ Quantum Access MAX. Thermo’s method provides automated sample preparation with its online TurboFlow technology. Waters and AB SCIEX, which issued its method jointly with Phenomenex, both use a “dilute and shoot” technique, which involves diluting the sample and injecting it directly into the instrument without sample preparation. Waters’s method utilizes its ACQUITY UPLC and Xevo TQ-S triple quadrupole MS. The AB SCIEX and Phenomenex method employs Phenomenex HPLC column chemistry and AB SCIEX’s QTRAP 5500 quadrupole trap MS or lower-cost API 3200 triple quadrupole MS. “The Phenomenex partnership offers an additional option for sample cleanup, if the ‘dilute and shoot’ is not ideal for a particular lab, which is pretty common,” Dr. Bailey told IBO. “A lot of labs are not in favor of doing a ‘dilute and shoot’—maybe they have an older instrument, they want to clean up the sample a bit better, they want to achieve even lower limits—so we have the option to add in that sample cleanup procedure if the customer wants to do that.”

Despite the different approaches, each company wanted to issue a method as quickly as possible. “There’s no point in waiting for six to eight weeks before you issue a method,” said Paul Young, senior director of Food Business Operations at Waters. “By that stage, it’s usually all blown over. People have identified what the scale of the problem is and then fixed it, largely, so we needed to be able to respond to this as quickly as possible.” Companies were able to do so largely by utilizing their existing methods for pesticide analysis and because of their familiarity with carbendazim. Thermo had a method for detecting carbendazim in other matrices, including grapes and baby food, but applying that method to orange juice was challenging due to orange juice’s acidity. “When you throw citric acid into the matrix, it complicates things,” said Vincent Paez, director of Business Development at Thermo. “We had to bring the pH to a level of 7, to a neutral, from a pH of a 2 or 3. That created some interferences.”

The instrument companies’ response to food safety events such as the carbendazim incident is important for maintaining and attracting customers. Initially, there was no way of knowing that the carbendazim incident was not a major health risk. By issuing methods, customers could test a larger number of samples for the fungicide. “Any time that an event affects international trade, that’s usually a signal that the labs are going to be busy and they’re going to need help. In other words, lots of samples are going to be analyzed simply to keep trade moving, keep the imports coming in,” said Dr. Paez. The companies’ response also sustains customer relationships. “It’s a reputation thing,” Dr. Zavitsanos told IBO. “It’s a measure of support. Most of this kind of support really helps you the next time [current customers] buy an instrument.”

Instrument companies’ response to such events is also important for gaining new customers. “People could look at [our instrument] and say, ‘wow, look at the low levels of carbendazim that you’re able to detect,’” Dr. Bailey told IBO. “So, there is an element of showcasing the quality of our technology for the method development to noncustomers.” Labs may choose to purchase a different company’s instrument to accommodate larger quantities of samples or upgrade. “If you have a large beverage company that’s importing a lot of different fruit juices from a lot of different places, and they want to carry out their own due diligence, then it may be worth their while investing in purchasing the Xevo TQ-S,” said Dr. Young.

< | >