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

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%, while 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.

Kelsey Robson, Nicholas Birse, Olivier Chevallier, Christopher Elliott