Protecting Consumer Choice: Ensuring the Provenance of Artisan Foods Produced on the Island of Ireland

• Project start date: 1 September 2013
• Project status: Completed
• Project type: Food safety
• Discipline: Food chain
• Author/s: Prof Gerard Downey, Teagasc Food Research Centre, Ashtown,Dublin
• Collaborator/s: Prof Chris Elliott, Queen’s University Belfast

Research objective

• A technology viability study to investigate the feasibility of applying specific analytical methods for isotopic and elemental analysis to the identification of the provenance of artisan foods.
• To investigate artisan cheeses produced on the island of Ireland to see if these analyses could corroborate the country-of-origin claims.

Outputs

Research report

• Title: Provenance confirmation of farrmhouse cheeses produced on the island of Ireland
• Publication date: 1 June 2016
• Summary: A provenance verification scheme is needed for cheeses produced on the island of Ireland.
• Findings:

  The strategy pursued generated a considerable quantity of baseline analytical data on the elemental and isotopic composition of island of Ireland artisanal cheese as well as a selection of artisanal cheeses from Great Britain and mainland Europe.

  While it was not possible to confirm the geographic provenance of island of Ireland artisanal cheeses with 100% accuracy, nonetheless trends in some of the data, especially the isotope data, suggest the possibility of effective segregation of island of Ireland from mainland European, if not Great Britain, cheeses.

• Recommendations:

  The analytical methodologies investigated have been scoped out for this purpose and can now be taken forward and applied in more focused investigations involving artisan cheeses and other foods produced on the island of Ireland.

  You can download the report below.

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