The Institute's BIOR implements 7 Framework Program project “Securing the spices and herbs commodity chains in Europe against deliberate accidental or natural biological and chemical contamination” (SPICED)
In July of this year, the Institute of Food Safety, Animal Health and Environment “BIOR” together with scientific institutions of 10 different countries has started to implement an international 7 Framework Program project SPICED. The general partner and coordinator of the project is the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR).
The aim of the project is to improve the safety and security of the entire food supply chain for spices and herbs, i.e. from the cultivaton or their import into Europe to processing, trading and consumption (”From farm to fork approach”).
The overall objectives of the project are:
- to characterize the heterogeneous matrices of spices and herbs and their respective production and supply chains in context with relevant biological and chemical hazards that can lead to major deliberate, accidental or natural contaminations in the food supply chain;
- to improve the knowledge on biological hazards properties as well as on-site and high throughput diagnostic methods for appropriate detection;
- to reduce (industrial) chemical adulterations and to ensure authenticity of spices and herbs by evaluation and improvement of non-targeted fingerprinting methods;
- to improve alerting, reporting and decontamination systems as well as techniques to ensure prevention and response on high quality level.
The approved project is planned to be implemented in 3 stages, 36 months from July 2013. The total cost of the project is 4'587'561 EUR, of which the Institute's BIOR as the project partner total budget is 134'400 EUR. The European Commission's co-financing rate for this project is 75% for the Institute BIOR, which is 102'600 EUR.
Homepage of the Project: www.spiced.eu