Good practice:

Collection of food fraud analyses, that Slovenian R&D institutions make

Food safety experts usually do not have good connections with R&D institutions and consequently do not know which institute makes which analyses. We have connections with both, R&D institutions, and food companies. That is why, we made a list of all food fraud analyses from FoodIntegrity Handbook, send it to our R&D institutions and inform food safety experts about it.

The Food Integrity Handbook has been written for food business operators and is primarily aimed for quality control managers working in food production and to those actors involved in the food supply chain. In this book, food fraud analyses are listed by food groups, like milk and milk products, meat and meat products… We made the same Excel document, with each food group in separate sheet and send it to Slovenian R&D institutions. Feedback was very satisfying, almost all Slovenian institutes, that cover food fraud area, responded:
-National Institute of Chemistry,
-Jozef Stefan Institute,
-National laboratory of health, environment, and food,
-The Agricultural Institute of Slovenia,
-National institute of biology,
-Slovenian institute of hop research and brewing,
-Institute for Olive culture,
-University of Ljubljana, Biotechnical Faculty,
-Institute of diary science and probiotics.

After collecting all analyses regarding food fraud in one table, we sent the table to all food safety experts, to connect them with right people to perform food fraud analysis.

The resources required are human resources-we needed one person to communicate with R&D institutions and to collect and put their food fraud analyses in one table.

After we collected all food fraud analyses, that Slovenian R&D institutions are making, we sent this table to food safety experts in food companies. They were very satisfied because they had all the analyses regarding food fraud in one place and they also get contacts from people, who manage these analyses, so they know on which person they can turn on, when they want to check the authenticity of their raw materials.

We had some challenges collecting data from some R&D institutions, but at the end, we were very happy, since all of them responded and send us information about which food fraud analyses, they are offering.

This good practice would be very useful in every country, because it helps food safety experts to turn on right person, when they need to do analyses to check, if their raw materials are frauded. As far as we know, Estonian colleagues, that are also working on Qualify project are making similar database, which will help their food safety experts.