Food producers will soon be required to react to FSA's new 'Guidance on Allergen Control and Consumer Labelling'
Having recently had to deal with new EC Legislation on mandatory allergen ingredient labelling, food producers will soon be required to react to FSA's new 'Guidance on Allergen Control and Consumer Labelling'.
The draft guidance, issued for consultation in autumn 2005, is now being revised for publication in summer 2006.
Since EC legislation does not cover the unintended presence of allergens and it is generally accepted that excessive use of warning labels (e.g 'may contain') both restricts choice and devalues an important message, the guidance will recommend that HACCP techniques are employed to reduce allergen contamination.
The guidance also covers the more onerous task of ensuring that the claims of a rapidly increasing number of 'free from' products are valid and backed by systems that help ensure a 'due diligence' defence.
During the development of a formal allergen control plan, the identification of critical control points can be simplified and hastened by the judicious use of allergen/gluten tests, particularly when allied to swabbing techniques.
Kit manufacturers are responding with simplified test formats that can be performed on site by non-technical staff with simple equipment.
To date such tests have employed so-called dry strip/lateral-flow technologies but these can be tricky to interpret, or simply unable to cope with high levels of gluten/allergens in the food samples being tested (the so-called high dose hook effect).
Hallmark Analytical has developed a novel, credit-card sized test format that is easy to perform, simple to read and copes easily with extreme ranges of allergen/gluten.
The Haven Gluten Flowthrough Test is designed to be used in small laboratories or food companies that perform on-site gluten testing but where sample numbers do not justify the use of Elisa techniques.
GFT tests can detect gluten levels in foods down to about10-20ppm and in surface/environmental swabbing solutions at about 0.25ppm yet take as little as ten minutes to perform.
The presence of a pink/red spot on the left (and a procedural control spot on the right) of the test area denotes a positive result.
One unique feature of this format is that two separate test spots (plus a control spot) can be placed in the test area.
Hallmark is employing this ability to develop a milk allergen test - for both casein and b-LG/whey proteins - as well as a peanut/almond combination.
