Vegetarian and Vegan Testing

With the increasing growth in demand for Vegetarian and Vegan Testing offerings it has become an essential to any due diligence programmes to be able to validate these claims.

PAS is able to offer a non-specific meat detection assay, based upon DNA and which is ideally suited to the detection of meat contamination in vegan and/or vegetarian products. Meat is readily detected above the 0.005% level even in the presence of both milk and cheese, ingredients that traditionally render analyses ineffective. Due diligence by manufacturers and retailers to detect such adventitious or fraudulent contamination in these products serves to reassure vegans, vegetarians and ethnic groups whose religious beliefs forbid consumption of particular species that they are indeed purchasing food of true vegetarian or vegan origin. 

Our non-specific meat DNA detection uses Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). If the analysis is negative, no DNA is present (LOD 0.005%) – if it is positive you can then consider looking at speciation to identify the meat(s) present.

The analysis detects specific DNA present in a gene which is a universal component of muscle tissue – hence it is universally applicable and will detect all animal DNA including human and fish, i.e. it is not species specific. 

If the validation is for vegan products then additional testing to demonstrate that the relevant milk (either lactose, casein or beta-lactoglobulin) and egg are also not present – all analyses that are conducted on site at PAS.Vegetarian and Vegan Testing