Separations in the Food Industry
The global food, beverage, and agriculture industry caters to the population of the entire world. Even though the food industry does not rely on laboratory instrumentation to the same extent as perhaps other industries, the sheer size of the industry results in a considerable market for laboratory instruments. Many applications are related to safety, quality control, and research of new food ingredients and products.
The global food, beverage, and agriculture industry caters to the population of the entire world. Even though the food industry does not rely on laboratory instrumentation to the same extent as perhaps other industries, the sheer size of the industry results in a considerable market for laboratory instruments. Many applications are related to safety, quality control, and research of new food ingredients and products.
2008 Food Analytical Instrumentation Demand by Technology
Among the numerous analytical instrumentation and product categories used in the food industry, such as food hygiene, life science, mass spectrometry, spectroscopy, materials characterization, and others, the separations category accounts for the largest share. Separation includes the many forms of chromatography that have always formed an important part of the analysis of complex food samples. The various separations technologies frequently used for food analysis are HPLC, GC, ion chromatography, LPLC, flash chromatography, thin-layer chromatography, capillary electrophoresis, and continuous flow analysis.
Separation techniques in the food industry are used for hundreds of applications, some of which include detection of aflatoxins in foods, amino acid analysis, vitamin separations, profiling various food components, analysis of colorants and residues, triglyceride determination, sugar content analysis, and determination of various other organic compounds.
In 2008, the separations market accounted for more than a fifth of the laboratory analytical instrumentation demand in the food industry. Demand for quality control applications and stronger mandates for food safety are expected to drive growth, particularly for LC–MS and GC–MS systems.
The foregoing data was extracted and adapted from SDi’s Market Analysis and Perspective report entitled, The Analytical Cornucopia: The Food, Beverage and Agriculture Market for Analytical Instruments. For more information, contact Glenn Cudiamat, VP of Research Services, Strategic Directions International, Inc., 6242 Westchester Parkway, Suite 100, Los Angeles, CA 90045, tel. (310) 641-4982, fax (310) 641-8851, e-mail:cudiamat@strategic-directions.com
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