While in the June issue of Food Science and Technology we explored the likelihood of food fraud risks increasing during the pandemic, the December issue focuses on recent advances in monitoring food authentication. A wide range of approaches and cutting edge analytical techniques, such as next generation DNA sequencing and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, make up the toolbox for monitoring food authentication (p26). While we cannot expect to eliminate all food fraud, the challenge for analysts is to stay one jump ahead of the fraudsters. Different animal species are often used as adulterants in foods and their detection has become increasingly important. A new database tool has been developed to assist food testing laboratories with the selection of appropriate methods and primers for use in DNA barcoding of animal species (p34). The aim is to validate the analytical approach so that results will stand up in court. A new food assurance Kitemark from BSI, which verifies product claims and customer promises, can help to guard against activities in the supply chain that might lead to adulterated and counterfeit products (p31). It offers an opportunity to build trust and transparency with consumers. The recently established EU Knowledge Centre for Food Fraud and Quality provides up-to-date information concerning food fraud and quality issues (p24). It is developing an early warning system for EU food supply chains and seeks to encourage cooperation between Member States to tackle fraud issues. It is clear that collaboration along supply chains and across national boundaries is essential if we are to reduce the risk of food fraud. We also address topics relating to managing the COVID-19 pandemic within food businesses and issues of concern to the food industry surrounding Brexit. The future is very uncertain at present, but planning ahead and co-operation within the food sector should lead to more positive outcomes in 2021. I am very pleased to welcome Dr Caroline Eliot to the FS&T Advisory Board and look forward to working with her. I would like to wish you all a Happy Christmas and a more hopeful and prosperous 2021. email mb@biophase.co.uk Letters to the editor about any of the articles published in Food Science and Technology are welcomed Forests cover almost 30% of the world's land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Stopping commodity-driven deforestation is critical to addressing global climate change, preserving biodiversity and ensuring reliable and sustainable raw materials and supply chains. The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) launched the ‘Forest Positive Coalition of Action’ in September 2020 as part of ‘Climate Week’1. The Coalition consists of 18 consumer goods retailers and manufacturers from around the world with a shared commitment to leverage collective action and accelerate systemic efforts to remove deforestation, forest degradation and conversion from key commodity supply chains. The Coalition, led by the respective company CEOs and co-sponsored at the CGF Board level by Carrefour and Mars, brings the world's largest consumer goods brands together with a collective market value of US$1.8tn. The Coalition's ambition is to utilise its collective reach and knowledge, global networks and resources, to engage and collaborate with producers, suppliers and traders, as well as governments and civil society, to advocate for forest positive solutions. In addition to Mars and Carrefour, the Forest Positive Coalition for Action members include other major food companies and supermarkets, such as Danone, General Mills, Mondelēz International, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Unilever. As part of their commitments, members of the Coalition will work constructively with governments – both in producer nations and importing nations – to encourage them to put in place practical measures to support a forest positive future. The Coalition will advocate and support practises to change behaviours and processes at a macro-level to support global forests. The Coalition's Commodity Working Groups have been engaging in stakeholder consultations throughout the year to develop commodity roadmaps. Furthermore, the Coalition has launched a digital engagement platform as a tool to use in dialogues with stakeholders from the NGO community and civil society2. The platform, called Evergreen, will provide an online space for the Coalition, its members and stakeholders to collaborate, discuss and share knowledge. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is investing in four cutting edge plastic recycling plants3. These plants will increase the available recycling capacity in the UK and expand the range of plastics being recycled, as opposed to being sent to landfill or incineration, or exported overseas for disposal. The £20m investment from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, along with over £65m from industry, represents the largest investment the UK has made in plastic packaging recycling technologies to date and has the potential to create hundreds of new jobs in the North of England and Scotland. The technologies include a hydrothermal liquefaction process to convert waste plastic into chemicals and oils for use in the manufacture of new plastic, a thermal cracking procedure to transform end-of-life plastics into hydrocarbon oil that can be used in plastic production, and a depolymerising facility that extracts colour from waste allowing easier reuse. One of the projects, involving Veolia, Unilever, Charpak and HSSMI, will develop the UK's first dual PET bottle and tray recycling facility (supported by a digital twin created by HSSMI), capable of recycling 100% of clear rigid PET in a closed-loop system. Unilever will investigate the non-food contact recycled PET produced from this facility in its home and personal care range, so avoiding the use of food contact grade material in these non-food products. Charpak will use the flakes produced in its trays, making tray to tray recycling a reality. This will create a new, complementary non-food closed loop for recycled PET and widen availability of the material for use in bottles and trays. Through the development and use of the digital twin, HSSMI will pioneer a virtual engineering approach in the waste industry, which will help optimise the facility. If initial trials are successful, the proposed facility would process 35,000tpa of mixed PET packaging waste at an existing Veolia site. Another project led by Recycling Technologies has been awarded funding for a chemical recycling plant that uses thermal cracking to recycle a wide range of plastic waste that cannot be recycled by conventional methods. The plant is designed to process 7,000tpa of hard-to-recycle mixed plastic waste, producing 5,200tpa of a hydrocarbon oil which can replace crude oil in plastics production - allowing plastic to be recycled an unlimited number of times. It will be based in Perth, Scotland. With partners, Neste Corporation and Unilever, this project combines the expertise of these three global companies in their respective business areas to develop chemical recycling and make hard-to-recycle plastic packaging, such as films, sachets and pouches, recyclable. BSI, in its role as the UK National Standards Body, has published the first standard for measuring the biodegradability of polyolefins: the most littered form of plastic packaging4. The standard provides methodology for innovators and plastic manufacturers to measure the biodegradability performance of packaging materials and allows claims about biodegradability to be independently verified. The aim is to support industry, government and society in taking collective action to tackle global plastic pollution and achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The new standard, called PAS 9017 Plastics – Biodegradation of polyolefins in an open-air terrestrial environment – Specification, specifies requirements of polyolefinic materials enhanced with technology that imparts biodegradability in an open-air terrestrial environment. It also specifies the chemical analysis and the numerical limits required to meet compliance with the PAS at the end of each stage of testing. This provides plastic manufacturers with the means to obtain data on the biodegradability of polyolefinic materials and gives testing laboratories a standardised protocol to evaluate these materials for conformance to the PAS. The standard is sponsored by Polymateria and has been developed by a steering group of experts in the field of plastics: Waste and Resource Action Programme (Wrap), Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera), Polymateria, Anglia Ruskin University, Imperial College London, Avient, Impact Solutions, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The Government held a public consultation on standards for biodegradable, compostable and bio-based plastics last year and will be publishing the results shortly5. It is planning to monitor the introduction of this new standard closely. Cook Clever, an EIT Food-funded project, has surveyed 18-25 year olds (Generation Z) about their food habits6. The project, which is led by VTT (Finland) and has partners Valio (Finland), Rethink Resource (Switzerland) and University of Reading, brings together psychologists, consumer scientists, food industry representatives and app developers across Europe to try and tackle the growing problem of household food waste. Many of the participants said that they experienced fear of missing out (FOMO), impulsive food cravings and a feeling that they need to be regularly eating new and different meals. They want to make spontaneous and diverse food choices and are seeking new and exciting meals; they are very opposed to suggestions of having a strict meal plan and being more resourceful with leftovers. This has implications when considering how to encourage them to engage in less wasteful behaviour. Young adults also highlighted that their current lifestyle with shared kitchens whilst at university, limited access to big supermarkets without a car and demanding schedules, also made cooking and regular food routines more difficult, which is why convenient options, such as deliveries or impulsive dinner purchases, were more appealing. According to the researchers, current initiatives to reduce food waste often do not take account of different age groups and their specific challenges. A more specialised approach is needed for Generation Z and this will be developed in the next phase of the project. These results suggest that a host of personal desires, preferences and day-to-day issues are preventing a greater level of engagement with reducing household food waste. Italian scientists at the University of Cagliari have developed a new optical food monitoring label able to check past exposure to warmth and determine whether food is still fit for human consumption – even after the ‘use-by’ date has passed7. Professor Carbonaro and his team at the University of Cagliari are working with ACTPHAST 4R – an EU innovation hub designed to give academic researchers throughout Europe access to top-level expertise and technologies in photonics to produce demonstrators for scientific breakthroughs. It is supported by the European Commission and the Photonics Public-Private-Partnership under the Horizon2020 programme for Innovation Actions. The UV scanner can determine an average temperature of the food, which is compared to an expected value. UV is exploited to activate the labels and then visible light is used to excite the Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) to read their history. According to the researchers, this can provide an accurate window of expiration giving food companies a precise picture of whether a food item has been affected during transit. Supply chain workers can then assess the likely expiration date against a set of pre-programmed criteria in real-time to optimise the transport of goods – effectively fine-tuning the food item's use-by date by the time it reaches a supermarket shelf. In parallel with the technical development work, the researchers have also been working with prospective industrial users of the technology to better understand their requirements and validate the application use cases. Studies on wine showed that although the expiration period is not necessarily affected by changes in temperature, heat can have an impact on flavour, which is a very important criterion for vendors, producers and consumers. While the innovation project began approaching the technology from a food waste point of view, it soon became apparent that the UV monitoring labels had other beneficial uses. The scientists hope to license the technology or create a new spin-out company to bring the innovation to market in the next two years. A new digital service, CropMonitor Pro, has been launched to help growers and agronomists predict the likelihood of pest and disease outbreaks on their farms8. The CropMonitor Pro decision support service is a collaboration between CHAP and Fera Science and extends the regional risk evaluation service (Crop Monitor), which was first launched in 2003. Development work has been funded by Innovate UK as part of the UK Agri-tech Strategy. The updated service provides field-level risk prediction for a range of pests and diseases affecting winter wheat, winter oilseed rape and potatoes. Analytical tools are becoming increasingly popular for growers. Retailers, agrochemical companies and government are all looking to better predict the risk of pest and disease outbreaks to mitigate against supply chain shortages, predict sales and encourage environmental stewardship. For the grower, a better understanding of the level of pest and disease risk can ensure pesticides are only applied when required. This will not only offer immediate savings on both chemical applications and operational expenditure, but will also reduce the threat of resistance against an increasingly limited arsenal of available crop protection products. CropMonitor Pro estimates infection risk by analysing the complex relationship between weather, crop growth stage, management practices and disease or pest characteristics. It uses a simple traffic light system to show crop susceptibility and suggests optimum times to spray – and when to avoid spraying – for up to four days ahead with up to 85% accuracy. The system benefits from almost 20 years of historical winter wheat disease data: models which could be validated against this dataset were shown to have a false negative rate of less than 15%. The new system for growers and agronomists and will be available directly through the CropMonitor website on a subscription basis. ■ Dear Editor I have been a member since the Institute was first formed. I attended the inaugural meeting at the Café Royal in Regent St and listened to the talks given by among others, Walter Butterworth and Magnus Pike, both exceedingly good scientists, but also raconteurs, so we had something to laugh about. I'm sure all there would be amazed at the subsequent success of the Institute and the number of members today. In those days the Royal Institute of Chemistry had a section devoted to food and took a dim view of the Institute, but obviously food involves animals and plants, their anatomy and physiology, and was felt by inaugural members to require a wider expertise than just chemistry. Did you find any other members who were at the first meeting? There were only about 30-40 if my memory serves me – I would like to know who they are so that I can contact them. However what drove me to write to you was the use of acronyms in the journal. I haven't counted them but I guess there must be well over 100. In particular the article by Ximena Schmidt found me (and I suspect many others) going backwards in the article to find the first mention of an acronym to find its meaning. To avoid this why not put the acronyms in alphabetical order in their own column on the left of the article? It would then be much easier to locate their meaning. Regards, John Hanford 7-9 December 2020 4TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY Venue online Web globalfoodsecurity conference.com/ 25 February-3 March 2021 INTERPACK Venue Dusseldorf, Germany Web interpack.com/ 24-25 March 2021 THE FUTURE OF PLANT-BASED PROTEINS Venue Amsterdam, Netherlands Web plantproteinconference.com/ 8-9 April 2021 PLANT BASED WORLD CONFERENCE AND EXPO Venue London Web plantbasedworldeurope.com/ 12-14 April 2021 FOODEX Vebue NEC, Birmingham Web foodex.co.uk/ 26-27, April 2021 7TH ANNUAL TRANSLATIONAL MICROBIOME CONFERENCE Venue Washington DC, USA Web microbiomeconference.com/ 18-21 July 2021 IFT ANNUAL MEETING & FOOD EXPO Venue Chicago, USA Web iftevent.org/Schedule%20Events/Future%20Dates