# food

Aquagro is a company specialized in exporting fresh swordfish to Europe from the South Pacific. Its primary goal is to deliver a superior service that provides its clients with complete comfort regarding the quality and safety of their seafood products. At Aquagro, 100% of the fish is inspected for mercury levels in order to meet all European consumer-safety regulations. Aquagro is capable of sampling about 6,500 samples every month. Aquagro’s testing lab was experiencing difficulties with handling large number of samples and rush deliveries that needed to be processed every day to ensure quality and compliance with European legal requirements and regulations. After evaluating many instruments, the Milestone DMA-80 evo direct mercury analyzer was the clear choice to meet Aquagro’s significant throughput needs.

A new method for the determination of Cl, Br and I in food, mineralizing samples in a mixture composed exclusively of H2O2 in an alkaline medium is presented here. The high performances of ultraWAVE system allow to obtain high quality digested solutions with low Residual carbon content (RC). This innovative protocol allows to decrease the analysis process thanks to the fast sample preparation procedure performed with Single Reaction Chamber (SRC) technology.

RSSL deals with a wide variety of food samples on which they must provide either the ash content or the elemental analysis after ash content. The overall process time for these analyses was time consuming as it required several hours. RSSL wishes to provide a superior service to their clients and enhance their turnaround time for this specific testing. RSSL acquired a PYRO microwave muffle ashing furnace mid of 2019 for total ash determination in food samples. The muffle utilizes microwave heating to ash samples, which reduces the process time and electricity consumption when compared to conductive heating muffles.

The ashing test on food samples is commonly used for evaluation of mineral content. Microwave ashing procedure for determination of inorganic ash in food samples is an alternative and rapid method for determination of mineral content in food samples. Milestone PYRO system incorporates all of the benefits of a microwave system working with special fast heating/cooling crucibles while making the ashing application fast, easy, effective, and in complete safety.

The AOAC Annual Meeting & Exposition is where the global analytical science community comes together to learn latest advances in food safety science to meet current and emerging needs. Food testing for nutrients, heavy metals, and fats involves a series of steps that are often not fully optimized even in modern labs. Particularly during the sample preparation phase, these steps can be time-consuming, pose safety concerns for operators, limit productivity, and directly impact analysis costs. We will present how the Total Sample Prep Workflow approach addresses these challenges in both elemental analysis and fat determinations. Leading industry experts will share their experiences on how adopting these approaches has enhanced the routine and efficiency of their laboratories.