Eurofins Expertise Centre CCC announces new sugar profile method which is approved as the official standard for milk and milk products
Eurofins’ Expertise Centre for Complex Carbohydrates & Chemistry (CCC) announces the development and availability of a new method for the identification of sugars in food and feed products. The new method allows for the rapid measurement of 6 specific sugars, and total sugars, in one run. It has been approved by the ISO, CEN and IDF as official method for milk and milk products including infant formula, and conforms to AOAC 2018.001.
A number of legislative bodies across the world, including the EC and FDA, require specific and correct nutrition labelling of total sugars in food products. In particular, EU regulation No. 1169/2011 requires mandatory provision of nutritional information to consumers, and the Codex Alimentarius Guidelines of Nutrition Labelling (CAC/GL 2 – 1985) specify that this information should include sugars contents. Sugars refers to all monosaccharides and disaccharides present in food (apart from polyols, isomaltulose and tagatose), however until now there had been no official method available that could test for all these sugars at once.
Traditional methods require individual tests for each sugar, using enzymatic methods, which carry the risk of determining incorrect values. Eurofins CCC’s new testing method overcomes some of the problems associated with traditional methods. Based on Eurofins best practices and the EN-ISO 22184 / IDF 244, it uses high-pH anion-exchange chromatography with pulsed amperometric detection (HPAEC-PAD). The method consists of an aqueous ethanol extraction of the sugars in the food sample, followed by clarification with Carrez reagents. The clarified filtrate is diluted and then analysed in the HPAEC-PAD system for correct quantification of the individual sugars.
This method reports 6 individual sugars (glucose, fructose, galactose, lactose, sucrose and maltose), as well as the sum of these sugars present in a sample. By using only one measurement, TAT is reduced dramatically, and the stability of the measurement is increased. Currently, the new method is applicable to food and feed matrices, covering retail products and labelling requirements.
Eurofins’ Expertise Centre for Complex Carbohydrates & Chemistry (CCC) is part of the Eurofins Group, Eurofins is the global leader in food, environment, pharmaceutical and cosmetic product testing and in agroscience Contract Research Organisation services. With over 50,000 staff across a decentralised and entrepreneurial network of more than 800 laboratories in over 50 countries, Eurofins offers a portfolio of over 200,000 analytical methods to evaluate the safety, identity, composition, authenticity, origin, traceability and purity of a wide range of products, as well as providing innovative clinical diagnostic testing services and in-vitro diagnostic products.
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For more information, visit this page or www.carbohydratestesting.com or contact Dr. Jeroen van Soest, Business innovation manager via Carbohydrates@eurofins.com or at Sales-food-NL@eurofins.com.