Ensuring food safety in various steps along the entire food value chain is crucial to prevent undesired and harmful substances entering the food humans consume. Pesticides and antifungal agents used during growth, processing or along the logistic chain from the field to the consumer can be toxic causing a range of symptoms from stomach pain to the death of the consumer even at trace levels of concentrations. To prevent dangerous additives and contaminants entering the food chain governmental restrictions on a large number of hazardous components have been put into place and are tightly monitored. For a large number of tests complex and sophisticated equipment is required along with time consuming sample preparation steps, not permitting instantaneous sampling of the specimen at the point of measurement or in a timely manner. In order to become a commercially applicable technique, the complexity of the sample preparation and the analysis routine needs to be simplified without losing performance in terms of identification and quantification of the dangerous contaminants. Raman spectroscopy is a technology to allow for quick and rigid analysis of materials without a large amount of sample preparation. The use of surface enhancement of the Raman signal by means of gold or silver nanoparticles would allow for taking this measurement to the field with high accuracy for even small concentrations. The high cost and poor reproducibility of commercially available substrates has so far limited the successful application of SERS measurements along the food value chain. The use of an affordable handheld Raman instrument with mass-producible SERS substrates will be described in the frame of the contribution with respect to requirements imposed at various stages along the food value chain.
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