Food Standards and Quality Control

Food Standard and Quality Control

Lesson 03 :Food Sampling

Approaches for food sampling

Basically there are two approaches that can be used for sampling a food mass that is larger than the amount required for analysis in the laboratory.

1. Collecting many minute increments of a solid material and then blended to represent the entire foodstuff.
2. Collecting a quantity of material that is large enough to be compositionally representative of the whole food and then reducing to a fine mixture and then sub sampled.

Generally the first approach is avoided, since it is difficult to obtain a statistically representative sample and the sampling time can also be very long. The second approach would be more practical, accurate, and reproducible.