Food and Nutritional Supplement Testing

Pacific BioLabs offers several food and nutritional supplement testing services. Your food or nutritional supplement products are just as important to us as pharmaceutical products or medical device products and we give your food or nutritional supplement products the same amount of attention as any other product being tested at PBL. Our quality assurance staff ensures that instruments and processes are compliant to cGMP standards, so you can feel confident that your food and nutritional supplement testing performed at PBL is done to the highest standards.

Tests Performed

Heavy Metal Analysis in Food and Nutritional Supplements

Heavy metal analysis in food and nutritional supplements is performed using an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP/MS) unit. The ICP/MS instrument at PBL is an Agilent 7700x and is capable of identifying and quantitating trace amounts of heavy metals. Common heavy metal contaminants that can be detected in food are: arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, copper, iron, zinc, selenium and iodine.

Heavy metals in food as well as nutritional and dietary supplements can have serious negative consequences to consumers. The presence of mercury in fish and the associated negative health effects have been widely publicized but there are many other types of foods which have been found to contain toxic levels of heavy metals. For more information on heavy metals found in foods and nutritional supplements please visit FDA’s Metals Website.

Packaging Tests for Food and Nutritional Supplements

The testing of food packaging is needed because chemicals can leach out of the packaging materials and contaminate the food or nutritional supplement. Ensuring that high levels of harmful chemical do not migrate from food packages to the food is important to protect the consumer. For certain chemicals, the FDA has set concentration limits that can be extracted. Polymers, resins, adhesives and acrylics are of particular concern.

Pacific BioLabs can help ensure that your packaging choices are safe by providing you with high quality results for you to make informed decisions. Package migration testing requires a wide variety of analytical techniques and instrumentation. Often gas chromatography, liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry are required. PBL’s experience with these analytical techniques is second to none.

Microbiology Testing for Nutritional and Dietary Supplements

Pacific BioLabs preforms USP <2021> and USP <2022> for nutritional and dietary supplements. USP <2021> enumerates the total number of aerobic bacteria, the total number of combined yeast and molds, and the number of bile tolerant gram negative bacteria. USP <2022> is a test for determining the absence of objectionable organisms. The FDA requires that objectionable organisms are absent from nutritional and dietary products. The objectionable organisms tested are: Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium. If you are interested in these tests, please click the quote button at the top of this page.