food analysis
/ food uh-NAL-uh-sis /
Every nutrition label, every 'best before' date, every recall of contaminated produce rests on someone having measured what is actually in the food. Food analysis is that work: checking the composition, quality, and safety of what we eat and drink.
Concretely, food analysis applies analytical chemistry to foods and beverages to measure nutrients (proteins, fats, sugars, vitamins, minerals), additives and preservatives, and harmful substances such as pesticide residues, toxins, heavy metals, and adulterants. It draws on the full toolkit — titrations and spectrophotometry for major nutrients, GC-MS and LC-MS for trace contaminants.
It protects public health, enforces honest labelling, and catches fraud such as diluted or mislabelled products. Its standing difficulty is the sample: food is an extraordinarily complex and variable matrix — fats, proteins, sugars, and pigments all jostle the target — so extensive sample preparation and cleanup are often the largest and trickiest part of the job.
To check imported honey for adulteration, a lab uses LC-MS to detect added corn syrup and ICP-MS to screen for traces of lead; clean results let the batch be sold, while a positive finding sends it back to the supplier.
A complex food matrix means cleanup is often the hardest step.
In food analysis the matrix is usually the main enemy: fats and pigments can swamp a trace contaminant, so a recovery check (spiking a known amount and seeing how much is found) is routine to prove the method survives the matrix.