UmBio Inspector technology prevents food with toxic mold substances from reaching grocery stores.

The recent high-profile case where toxic mold substances had been found in two of Semper’s children snack products could have been avoided, with the help of UmBio’s solution for quality assurance of food products in real-time.

In early November Semper withdrew two children’s snack products from the market, after these products had been found to contain high levels of two toxic mold substances aflatoxin and ochratoxin. This could have been avoided with the use of UmBio’s system for quality assurance of food.

UmBio’s technology makes it possible to analyse the chemical content of food products during actual production. By analysing the product ingredients, it would have be possible to detect the high levels of mold materials in the early stages of production, before the final product was manufactured, packed and shipped out to grocery stores.

“The toxic substance aflatoxin comes from mold growth, on for example nuts or dried fruit. If the nuts or fruit are part of the final product, the toxic substance would often be present in low concentrations in the diluted final product. In order to avoid unwanted substances in the finished product it is possible to analyse the incoming raw materials”, says UmBios CEO Stefan Nordin.

The technique provides the analysis results in real-time

The UmBio Inspector is a mobile system that uses advanced image analysis to show the chemical content of organic material such as food or medicine in real-time. The system is deployed at a process line in the production environment and analyzes samples of selected products. As the UmBio Inspector scans, for example a cheese, bread or drugs, it analyzes the content instantaneously as the information is collected. UmBio’s technology shows the chemical content that is invisible to the naked eye, such as the distribution and content of fat, water, lactose and protein, or quality deviations such as mold.

This quality assurance is done in real-time and without the sample needing to be destroyed. The analysis may even be conducted through the product packaging. No time-consuming laboratory analysis is needed. Onsite staff can instead directly take part in the analysis results via a screen.

From an international perspective, UmBio has the fastest and most user-friendly real-time quality assurance system on the market today. The underlying technology is UmBio’s world leading expertise in multivariate image analysis. UmBio has its roots in the Department of Chemistry at Umeå University.

For more information:
Stefan Nordin
CEO UmBio AB
+46 (0) 70 374 57 94
stefan.nordin @ umbio.com