Food analytics offers a fresh look to food safety

Consumers have had access to food produce but few pay attention to food standards.
Danish firm FOSS Analytics has offered a fresh cut into the market with analytical solutions helping food, feed and agricultural industries optimise quality, efficiency and profitability with best-in-class automated and connected solutions.

During a three-day visit organised by the Danish Trade Council, representatives of five Danish companies explored development cooperation relevant to their businesses in the agriculture sector, understand the dynamics of the agricultural sector as a business in Uganda and visited farmers and big agricultural firms in the country. Seeds of Gold interviewed Michael Vinther Moller, FOSS area sales manager for Africa and Middle East about how their technologies can spur agricultural growth and food safety in Uganda.

What does FOSS Analytics do?
We analyse everything you eat or drink. So, when you go to the local supermarket to buy milk, it is labelled as four per cent fat with so much protein and all the other parameters. That is what we analyse and ensure that the milk is safe to drink. To give you an example, we have half a million milk samples in our database. So when anyone puts in water or anything, we can easily detect that it is not normal milk. So it is not safe to drink or buy. We can go deeper and analyse what they put in. but at least it starts by showing you it is not normal milk good for consumption. 

It does not matter whether it is wheat, milk, wine, sugar or meat, we analyse the incoming raw materials. What we are trying to teach in Uganda for dairy, for example, is that we should pay for quality not for quantity. Meaning, in milk, the most important factors are fat content and the protein content. We are trying to teach the farmers that the better milk, the more money they get. By using our instruments they can be able to get more quality than the quantity. The same instruments can be used to optimise the production because the fat is the money in the milk. To analyse a sample, it takes 45 seconds. We also have digital services among our offerings which means we can link all the dairies in Uganda. We can manage the quality from Denmark, if we want to do that. 

Normally, the biggest challenge in Africa is getting the right service. We can recommend what can be done from our side. We have local partners in Kenya that do installation and servicing called Nairobi Medical Services and has served 20 years in the East African region. We are looking for a local setup in Uganda.

What are you trying to achieve with your intervention?
Coming here, it is kind of two-fold. One obvious thing is to meet with customers. That is one side of it. The second part is to meet the government institutions because what we see in many places in Africa especially East Africa, there are no regulations. If I came to you and said your quality of the milk is not as good as desirable, then you can say well, I produce my milk you can choose to buy or leave it. So there is no demand for testing. There is a need for regulations such that companies have to live up to certain standards. 

We are seeking to find if there is anything we can do to help with standards bodies. We also have a new product that has been launched in India, a portable milk analyser that is very cheap which I want to see if it can fit the African market. I know in Uganda it is about finances. The dairy companies can equip their collection centres with this kind of equipment.

In 2019, you were part of the delegation that came to Uganda, what did you find that made you want to come back?
The contacts I created in 2019 resulted in sales. That time we met Brookside and they requested another meeting. So, it is to develop cooperation. I also came to Uganda without this delegation. I have been coming here for the last 15 years for investment plans in Tororo and here in Kampala.
 
Who do you target because these are premium services?
Our solutions are on the high price of the market. This is real. But it is also the best in the world. To give an example, 85 per cent of the world’s processed milk is analysed by FOSS. 
We have 55,000 instruments outside on the market now. I am aware of the high price that is why we are looking at bringing affordable equipment for the African market to open up low entry points for the collection centres. For the big dairies, they already bought our solutions because they have the finances to do that. 

In every sector, we have a low price solution. For meat we have a meat scanner with limited parameters but doing a quality job. In grain we have hand-held devices that we can bring to the farmers. We want everybody to benefit from our solutions. It is a challenge when you have a high quality market in a market that is not yet fully developed. 

How does this help Uganda get into the European market?
It helps in the way that you cannot sell into Europe until you consistently meet certain standards. If you have not done the analysis, you cannot sell into Europe. 
That is why our equipment lives up to the ISO standards. If you analyse our equipment, certainly you have the approval to do the export. But for me it is not so much about the exports but raising the quality of the food in Uganda so that you know what you are giving your children is safe to eat. 

That is why we focus on food safety. For example, some 15 years ago, Chinese milk was contaminated with melamine. That is when we started testing for everything because the traders can put in something else. T
hat is why we have a database with half a million samples to make sure we know what milk looks like. So if you put anything in the milk, we will be able to spot it.