Mark Wolfe reports on the South-Eastern Branch visit to RSSL in Reading
There were 16 attendees to this very interesting and informative technical visit. We were met by Mark Wilson, RSSL’s Senior Group Manager – Sales, who gave an overview presentation of the work of RSSL in the food sector, as RSSL also cover pharmaceuticals. RSSL is owned by Mondelez and has 350 staff in different countries. It offers specialist techniques rather than routine analyses and is ISO 17025 accredited. It has services in the following areas:
- Development kitchen for new products, reformulation e.g. reducing saturated fats, and optimising flavours or reducing off-flavours.
- Pilot scale facilities to bulk up production of developed prototypes.
- Determination of product shelf-life.
- Specialist lipid testing e.g. fatty acid profiles, stability and quality of lipid ingredients.
- Flavour and off-flavour analysis.
- Packaging testing for permeability of gases and migration of packaging chemicals.
- Novel foods offering complete analysis and safety determination.
- Microstructure testing using Xray and CT scanning.
Mark then handed over to Nia Willis, who gave a comprehensive presentation on RSSL’s complete allergen testing, which covers techniques such as WGS (whole genome sequencing) and NGS (next generation sequencing) and investigation into false negative or false positive results.
We were then split into two groups to visit some of the RSSL's impressive analytical capabilities. These included the instrument suites used for testing for food additives, flavours, taints and off-notes. The tour of laboratories that investigate foreign bodies in foods included an interesting discussion on identifying the source of glass fragments and a tantalising glimpse of a live family of ticks under the electron microscope. The microstructure testing laboratory used scanning equipment that was able to visualise the distribution of ingredients in cooked products such as biscuits and measure the amount of filling in filled chocolates, all without removing the packaging. It was also able to show how even layers are in products such as filled biscuits. All of these results are then sent back to the product manufacturer so that adjustments can be made to the production equipment if necessary.