The food industry is turning to a Scottish-based company in the front line of the UK's defences against food contamination as concerns continue to mount about cheap fish being substituted for expensive fish without the consumer knowing.
R-Biopharm Rhône, the manufacturer and Scotland's biggest exporter of diagnostic test kits, which was called on for help in the horsemeat scandal of 2012, is now being asked by increasing numbers of industry sources to determine if fish is actually what it is labelled as.
The Glasgow-based company sells DNA test kits which can determine the authenticity of fish products and provides a testing service to speedily let companies know if their fish is the species they paid for.
Carol Donnelly, Marketing Manager at R-Biopharm Rhône, said: "We are seeing increasing concerns, particularly in the fish processing industry, about cheap fish, often from abroad, being substituted for premium species such as cod.
"Ready meal dishes, for instance, which may say they contain cod, could potentially contain instead much less expensive fish such as pollock or coley. Even dishes which purport to contain prime material such as lobster might contain substitutes such as farmed prawn or crab."
The issue about fish has come to the surface in the wake of the horsemeat scandal two years ago, in which the Food Standards Agency found beef burgers with traces of equine DNA, leading to tens of millions of burgers being taken off the shelves by major retailers.
A study by University College Dublin in 2012 showed that 7% of cod products in the UK were mislabelled and the researchers were extending their investigations to other products including hake, tuna and monkfish.
Fishing is now a global industry and tests across Europe have identified fish species which had never previously been commercialised in the food chain. One of the lead researchers in the University College Dublin study found that cod had been substituted by fish such as Vietnamese pangasius.
R-Biopharm Rhône's expertise lies in identifying species' DNA which, generally, remains in cooked and processed foods, surviving the heat and the chemical elements within that process.
Customers can send samples to R-Biopharm Rhône for testing in its Berlin laboratory and it also sells kits so that labs can self-test.
Mrs Donnelly said: "There is a huge price difference between different species of fish and mis-labelling can occur in products such as fish pies and fish fingers.
"The industry is obliged to have authentic labelling on its products and it is looking very closely now at what is coming from its suppliers - and seeing some issues there. The number of kits we have sold for fish mislabelling has gone up significantly.
"At the end of the day it is fraud. Consumers think they are buying one thing and they are getting another - and paying more for it."
R-Biopharm Rhône, which is based in the West of Scotland Science Park in Glasgow, now employs 50 people, including 15 research and development scientists and is actively recruiting more production staff.
