The Laboratory Needs of the Food and Beverage Industry

Laboratories in the food and beverage industry are becoming more and more tightly controlled by regulations similar to those applied to pharmaceuticals. Regulatory bodies such as the FDA now require food products to be tracked throughout manufacture and distribution. This, in turn, is driving the introduction of laboratory information management systems in an industry that has formerly been run via manual processes.

Leading companies like Thermo Fisher Scientific have met that challenge by developing laboratory information management software (LIMS) that take into consideration all of the various regulatory protocols across national borders.

The Need for LIMS Thermo Fisher’s food and beverage clients illustrate the diversity of the industry. They include multinational corporations like Coca Cola, Bacardi, Frito-Lay, Kellogg and Nabisco. For these customers, Thermo Scientific SampleManager LIMS™, designed to be used in both manufacturing and regulatory environments, provides a centralised system to enable management to access data and extract information, allowing them to more effectively manage their laboratory operations. SampleManager LIMS also provides evidence and documentation that these organisations are in compliance ISO 17025, an increasingly critical component in laboratories performing food safety testing, as ISO 17025 governs, in part, the requirements for tests and calibrations, which affects the tests that are performed and the calibration of the instruments used in performing those tests.

In fact, the European Commission has recently determined that any company performing food safety testing in Europe must be ISO 17025 certified in order to perform certain tests. But international standardisation does not tell the whole story. “Different standards still apply in different markets”, explains Colin Thurston, Director of Strategy for Thermo Fisher Scientific. “Where the consumer is based determines the conditions that the producer has to adhere to. Therefore, even a single factory may have to apply different regulations if it exports to different countries. We have developed SampleManager LIMS to apply multiple analytical standards to the same product if it is destined for multiple markets.” Food companies themselves also work from multiple locations, often in several countries, and seek networked solutions that will allow the same software to be used in each location.