Avoiding Some Pitfalls in Testing for Mycotoxins for Pet Food Manufacturers
Published: February 13, 2006
By: John L. Richard, Ph.D. - Consultant to Romer Labs
Hopefully, as a pet food company, you are testing for mycotoxins in the incoming ingredients for your pet food products and especially testing for, at least, aflatoxins. Of course not all ingredients are even potentially involved with contamination by toxigenic fungi. However you should know which mycotoxins are of concern based on your ingredients. Once this is established, you should have determined your criteria for accept or reject of these incoming ingredients of potential contamination with mycotoxins, and you should have chosen a test kit based on these criteria and it should have performed acceptably in your hands.
Knowing that most of the uncertainty or error in testing for mycotoxins is in sampling, you should be cognizant of the appropriate methods of sampling the various kinds of vessels delivering commodities to your facility for inclusion in pet food products. Let us assume then that you have adequately sampled the incoming vessels and have prepared the sample according to specifications for analysis with the selected test kit. When using the test kit, make sure that you do not “cut corners” as the test kit has been validated by the manufacturer using the exact criteria and procedure as in the test kit directions. Also, make sure the test kit was validated by
the manufacturer for the specific commodity on which you are applying the test. Test kit manufacturers do a good job of validating their test kits before offering them on the market and usually they are approved by an outside agency, such as the USDA (GIPSA) or AOAC International, for specified commodities or products.
As a pet food manufacturer you should form a partnership with the test kit manufacturer and if you have reason to suspect that the test kit is not performing adequately, contact the manufacturer and work together to determine if and where there is a problem. Test kits are validated based on their performance in comparison to a reference method of analysis with a high degree of accuracy and sensitivity such as High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). So, if you question the results of your test kit, use some of the samples and have them tested with HPLC to determine if there is a problem.
Remember that mycotoxin testing includes sampling, sample preparation and analysis. As I said above, sampling allows the greatest uncertainty or error ( anywhere from 40 to 90 percent of total testing error) while the analysis part usually contributes the lesser amount of total uncertainty or error. So, believe your test kit as it has been validated, BUT if you think there is something wrong, make sure to “check it out” by working with the test kit manufacturer and have identical samples tested with the test kit and HPLC.
Now that you have adequately tested incoming ingredients of potential involvement with mycotoxins, I suggest that you periodically pull some product from the line and send it to a laboratory that is capable of doing HPLC analysis of the finished product BECAUSE it is highly unlikely that the test kit that you are using is validated for use on your finished product and possibly could not pass any validation criteria.
All of these above points are part of a Total Quality Assurance Program for Risk Management of Mycotoxins that has been instituted by many pet food companies. This program is integrated with their general quality assurance and HACCP programs. It offers a means to consistently and accurately monitor for mycotoxin problems and a means to deal with loads or lots of grain thatmay have been inadvertently been purchased and subsequently found to be contaminated.
As a consultant to pet food companies and to Romer Labs, I have been part of a team tosuccessfully institute such a program allowing pet food companies to avoid mycotoxin contaminated products.
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