New paper on using stable isotopes to counter food fraud published in Scientific Reports
Florian Cueni led the study with contributions from Dan Nelson and Ansgar Kahmen, which demonstrates the use of stable oxygen isotope models to predict the origin of fruit in Europe. The false geographic declaration of agricultural products is a major problem in the food sector. The analysis of stable isotopes of food samples has been as an effective method to identify the geographic origin of food products and to counter food fraud. This method was, however, limited by the costly and time consuming need to establish large stable isotope databases that suspicious food samples could be compared to. The work presented in this paper in Scientific Reports overcomes this limitation by demonstrating that mechanistic isotope models that are fed with climatic input variables can rapidly predict the expected isotope value of a sample under suspicion. This greatly reduces the need for large reference databases, and also helps to identify new areas where more targeted reference samples should be collected from. With these contributions, our approach removes a critical limitation for the use of stable isotopes to counter the false geographic declaration of food products.