Contaminants in food and feed: Inexpensive detection for control of exposure (CONffIDENCE)

Safer food, through rapid and cost efficient tests for detecting chemical contaminants in food and animal feed, is the major goal of this project. It is co-ordinated by RIKILT, Institute of Food Safety, The Netherlands and the project consortium consists of 17 partners from 10 European countries.

DTU Food is leader of WP3 on heavy metals, which focuses on the development of simplified and inexpensive methods for the determination of inorganic arsenic and methylmercury. Since seafood is the major dietary source for both arsenic and mercury in the European population, the project will focus on marine feed and seafood as sample matrices of interest.

The methods developed at DTU Food are based on microwave assisted extraction techniques followed by solid phase extraction of the analyte of interest combined with detection with atomic absorption spectrometry (SPE-AAS). The method's performance will be evaluated in international collaborative trials and used in surveys on fish and fish feed.