NIST Food Nutrition and Safety Quality Assurance Program Launches New Exercise

The second exercise of the NIST Food Nutrition and Safety Quality Assurance Program (FNSQAP) is underway. FNSQAP helps food laboratories demonstrate measurement competence to regulators, consumers, and others in the supply chain. 

The accuracy and precision of measurements made by food labs is important so that manufacturers and consumers are confident in the claims on nutrition and ingredients labels, and to comply with regulations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and international bodies.  

For many decades, NIST has supported these communities with reference materials that labs can use to check their analytical methods for food nutrition and food safety measurements; This program is another form of measurement support. 

Labs participating in FNSQAP can choose to conduct a variety of studies, nutritional and toxic elements, fat- and water-soluble vitamins, other chemical contaminants, and dietary fiber in food matrices, including infant formula.  FNSQAP participants are not required to select all analytes or all materials, but can choose as many analytes as are applicable to the work done in their lab. 

Participants in NIST quality assurance programs analyze the materials and share their results with NIST. In return, test labs learn how their measurement results compare to other participants in the study, and to the rigorously measured and agreed upon value, when available.  Each participant is provided with a certificate of participation, which they can use to show due diligence in establishing scientifically valid methods within their lab.  A final report, in which participating labs’ identities remain confidential, is made public.  To follow up, workshops and webinars are held to discuss results as well as methodological advancements in food nutrition and safety measurements.  NIST will also use the results to develop new reference materials and measurement science education targeted at the communities’ needs. 

Registration for Exercise 2 is now open, and will feature studies on nutritional elements, choline, carnitine, carotenoids, and fatty acids in infant formula, toxic elements in powdered cacao and chocolate drink mix, glyphosate in foods, and phthalates in infant formula and foods.