Dairy Testing Market

Food safety issues remain a pressing global concern, with contaminated food causing illnesses, deaths, and economic losses. Dairy products, among other food categories, face recalls due to microbial contamination, underscoring the importance of stringent testing to ensure public health and safety. An FSANZ article (April 2024) revealed 836 food recalls from 2014 to 2023, with an increasing annual trend, reaching 87 recalls in 2023. Processed and mixed foods were the most recalled categories, followed by dairy products. The rising prevalence of foodborne illnesses, as demonstrated by the WHO’s data, and increasing food recalls, as indicated by FSANZ, emphasize the critical need for robust food safety systems. Dairy, being a frequently recalled category, drives the demand for advanced testing methods to ensure microbial safety, nutritional quality, and compliance with regulatory standards. Recalls such as Rizo-López Foods’ Listeria incident underline the vulnerability of dairy products to contamination, necessitating rigorous microbiological and pathogen testing. Moreover, as public awareness of food safety grows, regulatory bodies are enforcing stricter guidelines, compelling dairy manufacturers to adopt cutting-edge testing solutions. Together, these factors propel the dairy testing market forward, fostering innovation in rapid detection technologies and predictive analytics to mitigate risks and enhance consumer trust.

The dairy market in developing countries is highly fragmented and dominated by small milk farms. Hence, as milk and dairy products pass through the processing, storage, and distribution chain, they face a higher risk of exposure to contamination or adulteration. The testing of food samples requires proper enforcement measures and coordination between market stakeholders, as well as supporting infrastructure. However, several developing economies lack these requirements; this acts as a restraint to the growth of the dairy testing market. Several other factors, such as a lack of institutional coordination, equipment, technical skills, and expertise for implementing legislation at the grassroots levels and, in certain countries, the lack of updated standards, are inhibiting the growth of the market for food sample testing. Inadequate basic supporting infrastructure to set up testing laboratories also acts as a restraint to market growth, especially in developing countries. Thus, strengthening dairy safety and quality control services requires considerable development of infrastructure, interaction, and cooperation between the industry and the government. These factors have been acting as a bottleneck for the growth of the dairy testing market in some developing regions.

The focus on reducing lead time, sample utilization, cost of testing, and drawbacks associated with several technologies have resulted in the development of new technologies in spectrometry and chromatography. The wide-scale adoption of these technologies provides an opportunity for medium- and small-scale laboratories to expand their service offerings and compete with large market players in the industry, as these technologies offer benefits such as higher sensitivity, accurate results, reliability, multi-contaminant, and non-targeted screening with low turnaround time. The dairy testing market is witnessing several technological innovations with major players offering newer, faster, and more accurate technologies such as LC (Liquid Chromatography), HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography), and ICP-MS (Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry).

The increasing number of national standards for food safety management has led to ambiguity and created the need for their harmonization. The leading industries in the food sector have recognized the higher costs and inefficiencies created by the development of multiple food safety standards. Audits are conducted to ensure compliance with government regulatory legislation. Neither ingredient suppliers nor retailers or foodservice companies are well served when duplicative standards and audits raise the total costs for food certification without enhancing or ensuring the overall safety of food. Industrial experts have often suggested uniform and harmonized food safety standards to reduce the multiplicity of food laws for better efficiency. In order to eliminate duplication and overlapping of multiple standards, the government and private-sector stakeholders should work together to create transparent and uniform food certification standards.