The presence of potentially hazardous chemicals in food and feed remains a major concern among European consumers. Recent feed contamination incidents, e.g. the presence of dioxins in bread crumbs produced from bakery waste in Ireland leading to contaminated pig meat in many EU countries , certainly contribute to fears about the safety of feed and food. Currently, a variety of analytical test methods are used to help ensure the safety of feed and food in Europe both for goods produced in the EU and imported from third countries. Many of these methods are tedious, time consuming, and require sophisticated and expensive instrumentation.

The CONffIDENCE project aims to further improve feed and food safety in Europe by the development of faster and more cost-efficient methods for the detection of a wide range of chemical contaminants in different feed and food commodities. These methods will not only save precious time in ever faster production cycles, but will also permit more feed / food samples to be monitored due to the lower cost per test. In combination with the broadened spectrum of detectable residues and contaminants the CONffIDENCE project will significantly increase feed and food safety in Europe .

Within CONffIDENCE, multi-methods will be developed for persistent organic pollutants, perfluorinated compounds, veterinary pharmaceuticals (coccidiostats, antibiotics), heavy metals and biotoxins (alkaloids, mycotoxins) in products such as fish feed and cereal-based feed. A balanced mix of novel multiplex technologies will be utilized, including lateral flow devices, flow cytometry with functionalized beads, optical and electrochemical biosensors, cytosensors and metabolomics-like comprehensive profiling. After validation, the simplified methods will be applied in impact demonstrators that contribute to exposure assessment and validation of hazard models.

Results will be disseminated to scientists and relevant stakeholders, including the feed industry, regulatory control bodies, DG-SANCO, EFSA, exporting countries, CRLs, CEN and consumers. The consortium consists of 17 partners from 10 European countries, representing 9 research institutes, 5 universities, 2 large feed and food industries and 1 SME.

The CONffIDENCE project is a large collaborative project within the 7 th Framework Programme of the European Community. It has started 1 May 2008 and it will have a duration of 4 years. CONffIDENCE is coordinated by RIKILT – Institute of Food Safety , Wageningen, The Netherlands.

In the presentation, the outline of the CONffIDENCE project will be given and some first results will be shown.

Contact: coordination@conffidence.eu

Website: www.conffidence.eu

Acknowledgements: CONffIDENCE has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme ( FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 211326.