Pesticides and Contaminants in Food

Pesticides are chemical substances or biological agents that are used to fight insects, microbes or other kinds of animals as well as plant pathogens or weeds.

Depending on what they are used for, pesticides can be separated into 9 different groups:

• Virucides
• Rodenticides
• Nematicides
• Molluscicides
• Miticides
• Insecticides
• Herbicides
• Fungicides
• Bactericides

There is a general acceptance among regulators that more accurate exposure assessments are required above the historical deterministic calculations, as food safety is a key area when health effects are being considered for pesticide usage on raw agricultural commodities.

Creme Food Safety can provide the most up-to-date information on exposure to pesticides and contaminants in food by combining scientifically validated probabilistic models with a full data set on pesticide presence and concentration in food.

The Creme Food Safety tool contains specific models for assessing pesticide exposure, such as:

• Probabilistic functions for modelling processing factors
• The ability to simulate variability and uncertainty
• Food grouping search tools to link food consumed to its equivalent amount of raw commodities
• Unit to unit variability models to convert monitoring data to concentrations of units of production as eaten
• Multiple pesticide analysis for aggregate exposure, recipe information and reports for key demographic groups

Some of our customers using Creme Food Safety for pesticide safety assessment: