Food Safety in the Spotlight

18/03/08 Where does the salmon fillet in the freezer come from? What's in chickenfeed, and possibly also in the barbecued chicken later on? Especially when it's about the food they eat, consumers want to know what they are buying and what ends up on their plate. The requirements to be complied with by feed and food manufacturers are correspondingly high in terms of safety, quality, traceability, and environmentally benign manufacture of individual products and ingredients.

The BASF Nutrition Ingredients business unit has now developed a method that makes all these aspects transparent. "Our S.E.T. initiative allows feed and food manufacturers to trace exactly which ingredients were used and which conditions applied in the manufacture of a product," says Dr. Christoph Günther, the man in charge of the initiative in the Nutrition Ingredients unit.

S.E.T. stands for Sustainability, Eco-Efficiency and Traceability and is based on the TÜV-certified (TÜV stands for Technical Standards Or-ganization, a body that conducts technical safety checks, especially those specified by national laws or regulations) eco-efficiency analysis. Eco-efficiency analysis analyzes the life cycle of a product or manufacturing process "from cradle to grave." The process hence includes aspects such as environmental pollution and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by the products themselves and their precursor products. This method is also used by the Eco Institute in Freiburg, Germany.

"In S.E.T., we apply this principle to our food ingredients and feed additives, making sustainability tangible," says Günther. "The data generated in eco-efficiency analysis of our products are available to our customers from the feed and food industry as required." That way, customers can see any time whether and to what extent the starting materials they use to manufacture their products are sustainable. The data are accessible to all customers anywhere in the world via GTNet (Global Traceability Network), a global platform used in the food industry for targeted sharing of product information material. "In this manner, we help our customers to meet consumers' growing expectations in terms of the sustainability and traceability of food products," Günther continued.