“When you think about the safety and the regulatory elements, there was not much, only what every individual developed a few years ago,” said Gerrit van den Dool, SVP for the commercial life sciences division in Western Europe.
“Now there are some serious hurdles to be taken and I think both the industry as a whole and the whole analytical industry had to adapt and we are still adapting,” he told FoodQualityNews at Analytica 2016 in Munich.
Asked about whether regulation was driving technology uptake, van den Dool said that companies had different approaches.
“Most of the companies in the industry are embracing the technology and see it as a difference. Every serious company wants to bring a serious product to the market. They want to be leading and not following. The leading food and beverage manufacturers are also leading companies in the regulatory elements.
“I always say, for a company like Merck, regulation is not a bad thing as it differentiates the serious companies from the not so serious companies.”
At Analytica, the firm launched the Samplicity G2 Filtration System – a technology that provides a high throughput alternative to syringe-tip filters for chromatography sample prep.
It also showed Spectroquant Prove Spectrophotometers for analysis of waste water, drinking water, beverages and process water.
The firm wants to be a partner to help industry, said van den Dool.
“We think with the increased regulatory requirements that the industry will be up to in food and beverage, we can be a major partner in both developing the technologies necessary to make sure that the industry will be able to comply with the regulatory rules that are out there as well as play a role in getting a step ahead in this.
“We have a long history of analytical techniques and technologies often applied in QA departments, really the regulatory part we are familiar from other industries, particularly the pharma industry but also others.
“We think we can leverage that, not because it is the same because it isn’t, it is going to be a little bit different, but we can leverage that knowledge and bring it to play in the food and beverage industry. Technologies like, whether it is classical analytical techniques or getting into cell culture, we can bring that knowledge in an application-focussed way to benefit industry.”
Acquisition integration
Merck completed the $17bn acquisition of Sigma-Aldrich late last year to create one of the main firms in the $130bn global industry.
At the time, Merck said it will have around 50,000 employees in 67 countries, working at 72 manufacturing sites.
The acquisition and the integration is a ‘superb opportunity’ because both companies have technology that plays into the market, said van den Dool.
“So whether it is classical in the Merck scope of things like the biomonitoring types of technologies or the cell culture technologies and then you see the Sigma side of things with the reference standards. Bringing those two together is going to be exciting for our customers and the quicker we can do that the better it is going to be for the customer base as well as for the Merck company.”
Meanwhile, Merck received accreditation for the quality control of dehydrated culture media tested at its Microbiology Quality Control Laboratory in Darmstadt in April.
ISO/IEC-17025:2005 is the international standard in testing and calibration for laboratory quality systems.
The accreditation provides a benchmark for lab competence for types of testing, measurement and calibration, informing customers that test data from the lab is accurate and reliable.
It ensures full compliance of the lab’s GranuCult culture media to the mandatory standard ISO 11133:2014 concerning the preparation, production, storage and performance testing of culture media.