Roberta Pellesi

Hi, I'm Roberta Pellesi. I'm the Molecular Biology Specialist of Barilla Company.

So, food fraud is not a new problem for food companies, but I think the most tricky point is that food companies have to change their mindset about suppliers. Because usually, suppliers are partners with companies in guaranteeing food safety along the supply chain. But, in the case of fraud, suppliers are not partnering anymore because they could see an opportunity to commit fraud against a food company.

I think it is very important to guarantee the integrity of product, because if you guarantee the integrity of product, you can protect the brand reputation. As Warren Buffet says, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it."

We use NGS methods for food fraud detection in spices (raw materials) and in ragù sauce (finished product). We use, for NGS instrumentation, the S5 from Thermo Fisher Scientific and, as well as this S5, we use the Ion Chef, which is the instrument that loads and prepares the chip from the library. This saves us eight hours of work.

We chose the NGS approach because it is an untargeted method. So, we really believe that for food fraud, when you don't know what you are looking for, the untargeted method, gives an advance in this case as you can skip the step in which you have to know what you are looking for.

I think that NGS has a lot of advantages because you could run, in one single chip, hundreds of samples. So, in this way, it could be considered a cost-effective analysis because you're saving reagents and saving time for the technicians.

You have just to collect a number of samples, and after that you could run these all together. So, it is very user-friendly in this way. Another advantage is that the data are very robust. So, for each sample, you could obtain thousands of sequences - the data are robust and very accurate.

Manufacturers could protect themselves from food fraud risk by sharing the know-how with other manufacturers and other companies. We really believe in that way of working: sharing the know-how, sharing the capabilities, and all together working against food fraud because fraud changes quickly, and we have to keep up with it.