Public Funding for Bia Analytical Ltd

"Food fraud costs British families £1.17billion per year according to National Food Crime Unit estimates. Due to the nature of adulteration, there are also increased food safety risks associated with consuming adulterated food and drink. Company revenue and brand reputations have been destroyed after implication in food fraud and safety scandals. The latest BRC global standards are pushing retailers to do more on authenticity/integrity testing. Conventional authentication methods are complex, laboratory based, require skilled operators are expensive and lack corroborative methodology. They are failing to meet the needs of the food industry stakeholders. Cibus Analytical are looking to introduce an innovative step change in food fraud detection to address these issues, we are working on a two-tier approach: * Customers will use handheld Near Infrared spectrometers to scan samples at point of sampling and will have access to cloud based chemometric models, that distinguish between authentic and adulterated commodities. Results will be delivered to their location in seconds allowing them to make informed decisions in a timely manner. * Suspicious samples will undergo analysis at our laboratory using our spectroscopy and chemometric model based accredited methods. This will provide confidence and support to our customers in their decision making and will take a fraction of the time of conventional methods. Within this project our aim is to develop and validate our first product offering, making our research more commercially relevant by creating a minimum viable product (MVP) to demonstrate our capabilities to customers and investors. Specifically we will develop and validate our collection of chemometric models for food fraud detection and transfer these to a cloud based environment; develop the agnostic user interface that will automate data transfer, analysis and presentation of results for the field deployable device; validate the applicability of our product offering through a feedback loop of customer trials; develop and accredit the additional laboratory based chemometric models needed to corroborate in-field results."