Metabolomic profiling to detect different forms of beef fraud using rapid evaporative ionisation mass spectrometry (REIMS)

Kelsey Robson,Nicholas Birse,Olivier Chevallier,Christopher Elliott

doi:10.1038/s41538-022-00125-7

Abstract

Organic food fraud is a significant challenge in the food testing sector—high price premiums, ease of access to produce to be relabelled and difficulties in developing testing strategies that can detect such frauds make organic foods particularly attractive and thus highly vulnerable to fraud. Samples of conventional and organic cattle taken across meat plants in Ireland and the United Kingdom, consisting of the neck (supraspinatus), rump (gluteus), and shin (flexor carpi radialis) regions of the carcass were analysed using a high resolution time-of-flight based rapid evaporative ionisation mass spectrometry (REIMS) system. The resulting untargeted lipidomic data (m/z 600–1000) was used to generate PCA-LDA models for production system and for muscle type, for these models, it was found that the production system model could differentiate organic from conventional beef with an accuracy of 84%, whilst the muscle type model could identify the cut of meat with a 98% accuracy; additionally, samples can be assessed against multiple models simultaneously, reducing analysis time and sample numbers. The use of REIMS showed considerable promise in its ability to detect different forms of meat fraud; its accuracy in differentiating organic from conventional beef is superior to stable isotope ratio mass spectrometry, with the added advantages of substantially shorter analysis times and lower sample analysis costs. The ability to rapidly confirm the cut of meat also demonstrates the potential of REIMS to concurrently determine multiple aspects of beef authenticity in a close to real time analysis.

Highlights

Between 2010 and 2017, thousands of consumers in the United States of America who were paying a premium for organic food were deceived[1,2]
The results show that rapid evaporative ionisation mass spectrometry (REIMS) is capable of identifying the individual cuts of meat with a very high degree of accuracy, approaching 100% when potentially mislabelled samples were removed from the model
Levels of 15N/14N indicated organic status as 15N pathways approach was not pursued further, the alternative would be to use a hierarchical approach with the meat cut being determined first, in conventional beef had been found higher than in organic due and the production system being assessed

Summary

Introduction

Between 2010 and 2017, thousands of consumers in the United States of America who were paying a premium for organic food were deceived[1,2]. Four Midwestern farmers had falsely labelled conventionally grown grains as organic and sold them to organic meat and meat product procedures, resulting in farmers feeding conventional feed to their organic cattle and selling meat and animal products to producers and consumers as organic when they were not fed organic feed and not reared by organic standards. This is one example of organic meat fraud. Various techniques have been investigated; a conclusive method has not yet been found. Regulations concerning different cuts are even more opaque, with considerable leeway being given on what names different cuts can be given, with further variations between different markets increasing confusion further

Methods

Results

Conclusion