A company in North Yorkshire is offering a test that can identify the presence of foreign eggs even in manufactured food products like quiche.
The test is being offered by the York company Longhand Isotopes, which says its testing can identify not only the country in which an egg has been produced but also the region within a country in which the egg originated.
Managing director Roger Young says that Longhand has already signed a contract to undertake egg testing for one major retailer and is in talks with another.
Roger's company uses the same procedure to identify the origin of pork, and he says that the recent horse meat scandal and consequent questions about food traceability have resulted in a surge of interest in Longhand's service. "We are very busy at the moment," he said.
It is thought that as many as 20 million laying hens in some European Union states are still being kept in illegal battery cages. According to British Lion Egg Processors, more than 12.5 billion eggs, the equivalent of some 625,000 tonnes of egg products, have been produced from hens kept in non-compliant cages since the EU ban on battery cages came into force on January 1 2012.
And whilst eggs produced from non-compliant battery cages cannot be marketed outside the country in which they are produced, food products in which the eggs are used as ingredients can be traded abroad. Ian Jones, chairman of British Lion Egg Processors, believes that this may be allowing illegal egg into the United Kingdom food chain.
Roger Young says that the test used by Longhand enables the company to identify foreign eggs even in food products.
The test is based on the fact that isotopes in drinking water are different from country to country and from region to region. "There is a measurable difference between Scotland and England, for example, and between England and France," said Roger. The water drunk by the hen shows up in the egg it produces and using the egg in baked products makes no difference to the identifiable characteristics. "The atoms don't change," said Roger. "They are still measurable."
In February the food traceability scandal spread to the European egg industry when German authorities launched an investigation into 150 farms suspected of selling eggs from overcrowded production units as organic. Roger Young said the test used by Longhand would be very effective in such circumstances because it could not only identify the country of origin of the egg but also whether or not it had been produced organically. "Organic eggs have a very different signature to other eggs," he said.
In order to provide the testing service, Longhand has spent time compiling a database of eggs produced in different parts of the United Kingdom. The database has established the scientific signature of an egg produced in a specific region, enabling Longhand to compare any eggs or food products they test against this database. The database was completed only recently with a final collection of eggs from a farm in Scotland, although Roger says it has not always been easy to persuade farmers to co-operate.
"We did come up against quite a bit of reluctance for some reason. I would have thought British farmers would welcome a test that enables us to identify eggs that are not British. It has taken us about seven years and cost us a million pounds in investment to get where we are now. If something is labeled British and it is not British, then that is a criminal offence. This test enables us to say whether the eggs are British or not."
One free range egg producer, who provided eggs to help establish the database, said six eggs were taken from his farm and six at each of the other farms across the country. Eggs were taken from 80 farms in all across the United Kingdom. "If this enables us to identify foreign eggs coming in then that can only be a good thing," said the producer. "Farmers should have nothing to fear at all."
One of the people involved in collecting the eggs for the database said that the producer had no involvement in choosing which eggs were collected. The selection was made independently, and Roger said that Longhand's independence was one of the strengths of the service it was providing. He said the testing was operated completely independently of anyone in the industry, ensuring that the results could be viewed with confidence.
Roger said that the science behind the testing had been around for many years. He said the technique had been used in archaeology and in forensic investigation, but it had never before been used commercially before. He said that Longhand had developed an exclusive relationship with a laboratory in Germany, which had been developing the use of isotope testing for more than 20 years. Through this partnership, the company was able to provide not only expert testing, using leading edge technologies, but also expert analysis and interpretation of the results, based on many years of experience.
Longhand has already been providing its testing service to the pig industry in the United Kingdom. It has a database of pig production compiled from 450 farms, and Roger said that testing enabled the company to take a piece of bacon and say that the pig had been reared in an area between Leeds and York, for example, or in East Anglia.
For eggs, the company now has a database for the whole of the UK and it is able to compare this against a database of egg production for continental Europe. As with pork, the test can identify not only the country in which an egg was produced but also the region.
Roger said he was aware of the controversy involving European egg producers who were in breach of the European Union ban on battery cages. Roger said that the test could identify whether an egg had come from outside the UK. If the egg was labeled as British, that would be illegal. If not, other investigations could be carried out to ensure that the egg had been produced legally in the country of origin.
