Food Allergens & Plants

Food Allergens

Labelling of allergenic food ingredients is extremely important for people who suffer from food allergies. The legal basis for the labelling of allergens is provided by the Food Information Regulation (EU) 1169/2011. Annex II lists the 14 most important allergenic food ingredients that must be labelled by manufacturers. In contrast, there is no mandatory labelling rule for traces of allergens unintentionally introduced into the food.

Traces of allergens can enter the product during storage, through contamination of raw materials, during production or even during transport. Many manufacturers therefore use statements on the label such as “May contain traces of…” as a precautionary measure for reasons of product liability. Such labelling leads to a restriction of food choices for people suffering from allergies, although it remains unclear whether allergenic ingredients are actually detectable in the final product. The introduction of threshold values for labelling allergenic traces based on clinical studies has therefore been discussed for several years.

The VITAL concept from Australia and New Zealand defines reference doses for the most important allergens and could therefore also be used for uniform labelling throughout Europe in the future.

Allergen detection or detection of allergenic components is a central part of food analysis. Sensitive and specific methods for the detection of allergenic contaminants are needed to protect consumers. The SureFood^® ALLERGEN product range enables sensitive and specific detection of food allergens (allergenic components) and their quantification with a real-time PCR test. For quantification, SureFood^® QUANTARD Allergen 40 is a reference material that offers the possibility to quantify 1 to 400 mga allergenic component/kg food.

The basis for sensitive detection is purified nucleic acid extracts. These can be obtained via automated extraction or column purification. For this purpose, CONGEN offers a selection of suitable and validated extraction kits.​

Plant Differentiation

The majority of food allergens are plants or plant ingredients. Analytical plant differentiation is also significant in terms of food fraud. The increasing scarcity of high-quality and expensive raw materials of plant origin is increasingly leading to the use of cheaper alternatives, such as replacing high-quality wasabi with a mustard mix or substituting basmati rice with cheaper normal rice.

As a result, CONGEN has developed SureFast^® plant detection, which provides suitable and rapid methods for plant differentiation to detect product fraud or botanical impurities, or to distinguish between the two.

All products for the detection of food allergens and plants can be used on common real-time PCR devices.

Available test kits