On May 19, Marshfield Food Safety, LLC (MFS) completed a ribbon cutting ceremony following their inaugural Food Safety Conference. The Marshfield Chemistry Lab is now open for business and is busy signing up new customers. The events drew food safety specialists from the industry and independent consultants for food safety, plus regional leaders from agriculture and food industry organizations.

Carlos Castro, chief operations officer at Marshfield Food Safety says, “The expansion of MFS into food-chemistry-testing services has been a work in process for the last 18 months.” There is excitement from Castro when he points out, “More than 30 chemistry methods have been developed to date. Seventeen of these already are ISO-17025 accredited. We continue developing more methods as needed, and we are also planning to pursue additional certifications with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These will allow us to better support our clients with their export and import needs. We are very pleased with the services implemented so far, and we are looking forward to the journey ahead of us.”

This is remarkable progress for a laboratory and even the accrediting body has acknowledged that they have not before been requested to audit any one lab so many times in a year. It is impressive to have so many testing methods of sufficient quality to accredit within the first year of chemistry operations.

Castro adds, “The analyses implemented have focused on testing needs from our primary clients in the meat, poultry, animal-feed, dairy, and produce industries. These include basic chemistry tests, nutritional labeling analyses, and several chemical contaminants such as metals, cyanuric acid, melamine, pesticides, mycotoxins, antibiotics, solvents residues, etc.”