Unraveling unexpected results in food and feed safety controls: a comprehensive workflow

Control laboratories regularly face unexpected results and signals as food and feed safety risks change over time and location. Despite recent developments in untargeted and effect-based analysis methodologies, most emerging risks are only discovered after intoxication has occurred. To adequately deal with emerging risks and unexpected results, a comprehensive view with an interdisciplinary scope of complementary analysis techniques is indispensable. We developed a comprehensive workflow to perform such analyses, including, but not limited to, microscopy, biochemical, analytical chemical, and physical-chemical techniques. We received three suspect samples with unexpected results from official food and feed control laboratories and applied the workflow. This resulted in: (1) discovering an unexpected fraud of fish meal adulterated with plant material; (2) a claimed caffeine-only pre-workout supplement that included harmful substances, improving and expanding existing supplement-monitoring methods; and (3) the presence of an unexpected steroid metabolite in bovine urine, which improved our understanding of risk occurrence in urine. We provide an interactive support file (free download) for control laboratories to apply as a transparent standardized process to move from an unexpected result towards the hazard-to-be-identified. Our comprehensive workflow can help timelier unraveling of unexpected results and support the legal requirements of a risk-based monitoring approach. In the future, this will lead to ‘investigation’ instead of ‘intoxication’ as the most common route to discovering new food and feed safety issues.