Looking to the Future of Food and Animal Safety

BY DAN LEBLANC, CORPORATE WRITER, NEOGEN CORPORATION

Since its founding in 1982, Lansing, Michigan-based Neogen Corporation (NASDAQ: NEOG) has earned its status as a market-leading company in the development of rapid food safety diagnostics, including tests for the rapid detection of natural toxins, allergens, dairy antibiotics, pathogens, spoilage microorganisms, and sanitation concerns.

Odds are strong that the quality and safety of the foods that you regularly eat are verified by a Neogen test.

Neogen’s success has been built through testing innovations, such as the development of the first commercially available onsite tests for mycotoxins and food allergens (e.g., peanuts and milk), which enabled food companies to test their products before they were shipped to consumers. Neogen’s customers now include the biggest, best-known food companies in more than 140 countries in the world.

Likewise, Neogen has become a market-leading company in the development of animal health products and innovative animal genomic services.

The company’s vision to build upon its testing success is to provide food producers, processors and distributors with innovative tools for analysis to make quicker and more informed data-driven decisions on their ranches and farms, as well as throughout the global farm-to-fork food chain.

The explosive growth in the fields of biotechnology and computer science has provided food producers and processors with an unprecedented amount of data concerning all aspects of their operations, including test results. Neogen is positioned to help producers and processors make sense of all the new data.

For example, for most food products, decision making starts very early in the process. When it comes to providing the highest quality and quantity animal protein food products, including meat, milk and eggs, producers start by selecting the best animals for breeding programs.

Neogen’s global animal genomics operations turn the seemingly daunting task of interpreting an animal’s genome, which includes billions of nucleotide base pairs, into easily understandable information. For example, cattle producers use Neogen technology to select the best animals for desirable traits, such as higher milk production, more tender steaks, or better disease resistance. These data-driven decisions result in a food supply that is safer, healthier and more environmentally efficient to produce — and more profitable for the producers.

In addition to animal selection, Neogen products can aid with operational decisions aimed at reducing contaminants.

The safety and quality of the global food supply is challenged by contaminants on every step of its journey to the dinner plate. Contamination can occur in a farmer’s field, such as sprouts being contaminated with E. coli or corn with a mycotoxin, or anywhere in the processing, distribution or retail process, such as with Listeria, or a food allergen in a production environment.

For all types of food products - whether they originate from a ranch, farm, field, orchard, or sea, Neogen’s testing products and services provide accurate information that can lead food safety professionals to make decisions that will affect their operations – and potentially their consumers and bottom lines.

In some case, those decisions are made easily to protect the safety and quality of food products. For example, if a dairy producer uses a Neogen product to test an incoming load of raw milk for the presence of dairy antibiotics, a positive test will lead to the producer to reject the load and, in doing so, protect the producer’s operations from contaminated product.

In other cases, these decisions are not so easy. For example, when a food processor tests its production environment and receives a positive Listeria test result. Was the Listeria detected the result of a persistent problem that must be systematically addressed and remedied by major changes in the processor’s operations? Or, was the Listeria a transient problem — a temporary issue that is not likely to recur?

In an effort to further assist its food safety diagnostic customers interpret their test result data, the company recently developed Neogen Analytics, an innovative platform that enables Neogen customers to automate food safety workflows and continuously monitor and analyze food risk data generated by Neogen’s food safety diagnostic products.

By automating and connecting multiple data points through diagnostic testing in a production facility, the food safety data analytics platform enables food producers and processors to harness their data and create a holistic picture around areas of risk that can guide operational data-driven decisions.

Neogen stands ready with the right mission to provide food producers, processors and distributors with innovative tools to make quicker and more informed decisions.

NEOGEN.COM