Paris-Saclay Food and Bioproduct Engineering
Research Unit (SayFood) (France)

Paris-Saclay Food and Bioproduct Engineering Research Unit (SayFood) (France)

The SayFood research unit is a joint research unit (JRU), created in 2020 in association with INRAE and AgroParisTech, that forms part of the Université Paris-Saclay (UPSaclay). The SayFood JRU gathers more than 80 researchers, 48 scientific or administrative support agents and more than 60 doctoral students, post-doctorates, and student interns, grouped into five multidisciplinary teams, a technological hall, and an administrative support pole.

In 2021/2022, the Eurofins Foundation supported the research project “Metabolomics approach for detecting unexpected chemical contaminants in food (MetAFoodSafe)”.

Chemical food safety evaluation is a public health issue that is currently undergoing major changes. This assessment is historically based on several “a priori” targeted analyses. However, its paradigm is evolving due to the recent emergence of new non-targeted approaches based on high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) coupled with chromatography. Despite this, many challenges remain which must be overcome before these new methods can be routinely applied by regulatory authorities. 

The research’s purpose is to investigate strategies to improve the identification of unknown or unexpected contaminants. This non-targeted approach will be used to provide additional structural information. Dedicated data treatment will be developed to reach a high level of confidence for compound identification. Tea samples will be considered for this method development, in line with previous work and for safety reasons.

This project contributes to the following United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal