Determining the Milk Content of Milk-Based Food Products

As a consequence of proposed changes to EC regulations covering veterinary checks on imported products of animal origin, there was a need for a simple method to verify whether a food consists of 50% or more of an animal-based ingredient (other than meat, such as milk, egg, fish or honey). As capillary electrophoresis (CE) techniques have already been successfully used to measure the amounts of milk proteins, this project aimed to determine whether this technique transferred to a lab-on-a-chip CE platform could be used as a simple test of whether milk-based food products contain levels of milk of 50% or more. Lab-on-a-chip CE technology has already been transferred to a number of enforcement labs and a successful method for milk protein quantification would utilise a further potential of this equipment.