Welcome to the Food Insights blog

Answers and observations from ALS, your trusted partner for reliable food testing

You may know that clients rely on us to help ensure the safety, quality and authenticity of their food products through our industry-leading testing services across our global lab network – but it’s more than that.

Our highly experienced experts are dedicated to providing unmatched professional technical consultancy: when you need us, we’re there for you, developing personalized, tailored solutions to meet your needs and answering your questions about testing, inspection, auditing, and the specific challenges facing your business, industry and the market.

In this spirit of knowledge sharing, our Food team is introducing our Food Insights blog: featuring in-depth answers to some of our clients’ most important questions, illuminating case studies, innovations in food testing technologies and stories from the lab and field to inform and support you.

The food testing business: it’s not just food testing

To kick things off, we wanted to give you some insight into our wide range of testing services that go far beyond direct food quality and safety testing. If you know us as the Food team at ALS, you may not know the full extent of our services around the world offered under the umbrella of our Food business.

So, for our first Insights blog series, we’re introducing you to all things Food that are not just food: over the next few months, we’ll take you inside the laboratory and out to the field to reveal the surprising breadth of our beyond-Food services. Each month, the blog will provide an overview of a service area followed by an in-depth story that delves into the work that service’s team is doing to support our clients in helping improve life.

Challenge testing: meeting any food safety challenge

Among our services, challenge testing may be familiar to many but not all our clients. Challenge and shelf-life tests help ensure that products remain microbiologically safe and of acceptable quality throughout the declared shelf life, while also meeting regulatory expectations.

For our industry partners – food manufacturers, quality and technical managers, product development teams, food safety professionals, and packaging specialists – who are responsible for shelf-life validation and regulatory compliance, ALS provides shelf-life studies under controlled and realistic storage conditions to help food businesses verify product durability, safety and quality throughout the intended shelf life.

These services are not one-size-fits-all; tailored studies are adapted to the client’s needs. We help generate data that is both scientifically robust and commercially relevant, enabling clients to justify shelf-life periods, validate packaging formats such as MAP, and assess the impact of contamination risks, storage conditions and product formulation.

Our challenge testing services offer:

• Support for regulatory compliance through evidence-based shelf-life validation
• Assessment of both safety and quality: not only microbiological criteria but also practical product stability
• Actionable results that can support product development, label claims, risk assessment and customer assurance
• External prove of competencies – accreditation.

These studies that support evidence-based shelf-life decisions and regulatory compliance will become particularly important this year in the EU as new regulatory changes take effect in July, which will also directly impact UK businesses exporting to the EU, who must meet the new standards to maintain market access.

Shelf-life validation is critically important as a compliance tool, but moreover as a valuable approach for improving product safety, quality and packaging decisions. That’s why clients rely on ALS as their knowledgeable and reliable partner for shelf-life studies, challenge testing and regulatory support.

Don’t miss our upcoming Challenge Testing webinar

Want to find out more about how our challenge and shelf-life testing services for food products can help you meet key challenges including the new EU regulations?

Join us on June 25 for our free, live webinar, “Challenge Testing in food: technical and practical aspects explained.”

Explore the technical aspects of microbiological challenge testing used to support food safety and compliance with the new regulations.

Get more details about the webinar and register today at: Challenge Test in RTE Food | Global Webinar | Join ALS Experts