When South American wineries want to know for sure that their products are worthy of their label, they call on Saskatchewan scientist Nicholas Low.

Dr. Low, head of the Department of Applied Microbiology and Food Science at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, is a food authentication expert with more than 25 years' experience.

Companies in the food and beverage industry must stake their reputations on the safety and purity of their products or risk losing consumer confidence and profitability, so they hire microbiologists like Dr. Low to develop on-site or lab methods to test the integrity of their products.

The 50-year-old researcher, whose customer list includes food industry heavyweights such as Sun-Rype, Nestlé and Tropicana, says 10 per cent of all food is not what it claims to be. The most recent major example was in China, where toxic melamine was found to have been added to baby formula to reduce production costs, sickening more than 50,000 children as a result.

Along with concerns about what is being artificially added to products, the food industry, health experts and consumers alike worry about the purity and safety of agricultural products and prepared foods — especially given recent fatal outbreaks of E. coli and listeriosis in this country. Is that fresh spinach really okay to eat? Should we risk putting packaged deli meats back on the lunch menu? What's really in this box of candy?

That's where campus researchers like Dr. Low come in. He uses chromatography, a technique for the chemical separation of mixtures, to identify trace carbohydrates synthesized by enzymes present in foods. This new and innovative technique provides unique fingerprints for identifying specific types of food. He can trace the botanical origins of a food product, such as wine or tequila or apple juice, and determine whether the manufacturer's list of ingredients on the box or bottle is true.

Dr. Low, who earned his PhD in food chemistry from the University of Alberta, has nine graduate students at work under him as he tracks the food production process from raw materials to production and finally consumption.

The UofS department's overall annual research budget is in the $1.1-million range, including Dr. Low's budget of $180,00, 25 per cent of which is derived from his corporate clients.

"The department average would be about 15 per cent of their research budgets so I'm well above that. However, most of the corporate consulting work I do is pro bono. When I do earn any extra money, I return it to my research budget so my grad students can travel to attend conferences," Dr. Low says.

One of his departmental colleagues, Darren Korber, focuses his campus research on reducing the threat from pathogens that cause food-borne illnesses. "The expectation that our food is sterile is false," says Dr. Korber, who specializes in the study of biofilm ecology.

"Biofilms attach themselves to surfaces where there are nutrients. There aren't a whole lot of differences between the biofilms found on your teeth and those on the Maple Leaf Food's machines," explains Dr. Korber, referring to the Ontario company whose machinery was the culprit in the recent listeriosis outbreak.

His lab work concentrates on controlling biofilms with a series of applications of chlorines and other antimicrobial agents. It's not an easy task to kill off the pathogens because biofilms are adaptive, opportunistic bacteria that begin to grow soon after the application is completed.

Dr. Korber, who earned his PhD from UofS and is now an associate professor in the Food and Applied Microbiology department, has been labouring in the biofilms field since 1994. With an annual research budget of $140,000, he works with five graduate students on lab work that is entirely government-funded.

Another Canadian university researcher focusing on food-borne illnesses is Keith Warriner, a professor in the Food Science Department at Ontario's Guelph University.

Dr. Warriner is focusing on three types of food: tomatoes, sprouts and meat. He has been a food researcher for 14 years, 11 of them spent in food safety.

"You've got to be broad-based in your research," explains the 44-year-old scientist who received his PhD from the University of Wales Aberystwyth. "What's hot one year in food safety can be cold the next, so I switch gears from produce to meats."

His clients include the Ontario government and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Warriner's annual research budget is about $300,000, and his industrial clients provide additional funds and support for laboratory and labour costs. The Ontario government, for exampled, supplied $230,000.

Dr. Warriner, who joined the faculty at Guelph in 2002, conducts groundbreaking research on seed decontamination. In research performed in collaboration with a British company, Vernagene Ltd., he discovered that bacteria could exist inside the leaf system of a plant.

"Our mistaken belief, prior to the research, was that the inside of a plant is sterile. It's not," he says.

His research found that seeds could be decontaminated using sodium chlorides, such as those used in toothpaste, to kill bacteria without harming a plant's cells.

For now, this new technology is still in the laboratory stage and isn't commercially available.

But Dr. Warriner is putting on his entrepreneurial cap to take it to market himself, without the assistance of the university. He says he has had interest from prospective clients in Japan and Australia for his decontamination method.

Special to The Globe and Mail

Food science at a glance