Looking for the best compromise in rapid food mycotoxin tests: speed, sensitivity, precision and accuracy

Mycotoxins provide additional challenges to food businesses in terms of successful management of food-safety management systems. These reflect, in part, an unusually high dependency on the activities of others in the supply chain to ensure that levels of contamination remain within set limits. Consequently analyses for mycotoxins by food businesses are primarily commissioned for one or a combination of two reasons: to determine compliance with regulatory or commercial standards or; as part of an exercise to verify the efficacy of the businesses foodsafety management systems. Given the regulatory/commercial implications, the standard of evidence needed to demonstrate (non)compliance will be the greater than that needed for simple verification. Consequently, decisions relating to matters of regulatory or commercial arbitration need to be based on agreed and well defined methods of analysis, which are normally laboratory-based. These data are also often sufficient to be used to verify foodsafety management systems. However, supply conditions may predicate the need for increased levels of verification and rapid mycotoxin test-kits have the potential to both meet this need and satisfy the requirements of statistical process control. Nevertheless, it is important to note that deployment of such test-kits cannot be considered to be a ‘turnkey’ exercise and that, as in the case of laboratory-based assays, care must be taken in the validation and subsequent verification of their use for a given material being used within a food business. In particular, this means demonstrating under local conditions that results from the use of these test-kits are comparable to those that would be obtained using official or reference methods.