Meat and sausage products are ubiquitous in grocery stores. Adulteration is a problem, however. Expensive types of meat are often substituted with cheaper poultry.

Allied Market Research forecasts that the global food authenticity industry will generate $10.0 billion in revenue by 2030, up from $5.3 billion in 2017, and witness an annual growth rate of nearly 7%. The meat the meat speciation segment is expected to witness the highest annual growth of 7.8% from 2021 to 2030. Fuelling new opportunities will be the rapid growth in international trade and technological advancements such as development of test kits for onsite testing.

At present, however, existing methods to confirm composition of meat products require testing in specialized laboratories with highly accurate and expensive equipment. As a result, the cost of testing rises while the time of getting the results increases. These conventional methods also require considerable operator skills and are unable to provide fast mobile on-site detection systems to detect contamination of meat products. 

There is a need to develop alternative, faster, and more affordable highly sensitive methods for detecting adulteration.

This led Russian scientists to develop what they call a quick and simple approach that helps to accurately detect pig and chicken meat in raw and processed products.

“Our development helps to detect chicken and pork meat in samples fast and without using unnecessary devices,”​ said Anatoly Zherdev, a leading researcher of the Laboratory of Immunobiochemistry of the Research Center of Biotechnology RAS and the head of the project.