Food AnalysisAny product that is going to be used by humans needs to be rigorously tested, and because foodstuffs are ingested, the testing is often more crucial to avoid any health issues from occurring. If a company produces bad foodstuffs, then the consumer can not only get ill, but it can also cost the company a lot of money in lawsuits and in reputation (the latter of which often has worse long-term implications compared to short-term financial losses). So, ensuring that foodstuffs contain what they are meant to (in the ratios they are meant to) is crucial and can be performed either in-house or at a contract analysis/research institute.

There are many reasons why companies want to analyze foodstuffs, and there are quite a few general areas of food analysis. In terms of the techniques that are used, the go-to choices are a wide range of analytical characterization instruments that are found in almost all quality control laboratories. For food analyses, the range of instruments used includes nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, gas chromatography (GC), atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS), and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), to name a few common examples. Methods which are more ‘wet chemical’ in nature, such as titrations and thin-layer chromatography (TLC), can also be used. The choice of technique(s) varies depending on what foodstuff is being analyzed, what is being analyzed within the foodstuff, and what the reasons for the analysis