Team:UC Davis/Olive Mills

According to David Garci-Aguirre, Manager of Production and Master Miller, Corto Olive Co., the quality control division of the olive oil industry is growing in leaps and bounds, sparking new research projects within the field, and inviting the development of new quality assurance instruments to facilitate industrial scale-up. During a June 2014 site tour of the Corto Olive Co. production facility, Mr. Garci-Aguirre informed the iGEM team of his interest in supplementing traditional and laborious methods of quality assurance, most notably gas chromatography, with more easily utilized and economical instruments. Other operations managers have corroborated this statement, offering future collaboration for real-time testing of the prototype at their respective facilities.

Common to these managers, was a belief that a rapid, cheap, and accurate biosensor for the detection of rancid compounds would be a useful addition to the olive oil industry. Thus, on the producer level, our enzymatic biosensor could be integrated into the division of quality control, allowing millers to more cheaply and easily inspect the chemical profile of their products. Producers using our device could broadly classify their oil as rancid or not rancid, and thus assess the quality of their stock. This understanding of quality control is supported by a set of criteria delineated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for quality control apparatuses. According to the FAO, quality control can be defined as “maintenance of quality at a level that satisfies the customer and that is economical to the producer or seller”[1].

Our biosensor has no aspirations to replace GC-MS or other major instruments of quality control. Our device would likely not offer the same levels of detection that an expensive GC-MS machine would, but could be useful to the producer in other ways. For instance, being able to make a broad stroke, on-the-spot evaluation of a sample of olive oil and to determine if it is rancid or not, may be just as useful in one regard as GC-MS is in another. Consequently, we hope to provide a tool that will allow producers to augment conventional, certified tests with a quick, cheap, and easy-to-use device for broad classification screening.

This device would also not likely be a formally certified instrument, accredited by the FDA, ISO, or some other regulatory body due to the rigor involved in attaining that level of certification. Through our tours of production facilities and research into industrial control regulations, we learned that preparing and approving a device for use in a quality assurance program is a lengthy and intensive process, requiring a proposed technology to meet many stipulations. The most basic requirement is FDA certification [2]. If our biosensor were to pass FDA regulations and be considered for industrial implementation, an operational protocol would need to be developed, meeting the criteria for the Process Control, Equipment Testing, and Process Validation subclauses, to name just a few.

Moreover, for entities involved in the distribution of analytical device like our own, yearly registration with the FDA is required. On this basis, we concluded that the best avenue of project development would be to produce a device that would augment existing quality control measures, rather than supplant them. Further information on FDA standards can be found on their website [2].

In summary, we learned the importance of meeting with stakeholders in an industry, in our case olive oil producers, millers, and food service representatives, as well as the value of gathering meta-data on the potential application of a project in an industrial setting. Gathering testimonies from stakeholders in the industry is a valuable means of refining project design and establishing what the industry need really is, on a very practical level.

[1] Quality control in the fish industry, FAO Corporate Document.

[2] Food and Drug Administration.