The CIFGA laboratory, founded as a spin-off of the University of Santiago de Compostela a decade ago, has obtained ENAC's accreditation for one of its main activities: producing certified reference materials (RM) of marine biotoxin compounds. Thereby becoming the first RM provider accredited for this activity in Spain and Europe.

"We have found accreditation to be the ideal method to gain our customers' trust, since there are other companies in the market offering various types of materials related to marine biotoxins but without any proven reliability. We wanted to differentiate ourselves from the competition with proven quality products", explained the CIFGA laboratory's technical team.

Marine biotoxins are toxins produced by microscopic algae (phytoplankton) that can accumulate in shellfish and fish and cause different levels of injury to people who eat these foods. That is why the EU has legislation for detecting and controlling these compounds (the EU 15/2011 Regulation) which requires reference materials to be certified.

Since contamination of marine products by marine toxins is a growing problem around the world, the laboratory members stress that accreditation can provide more guaranteed control:

"From the point of view of metrology, the use of certified reference materials should contribute to analyses being more reliable and this would translate into more rigorous control of products intended for consumption. Moreover, with the passage of time it would provide a database with comparable results for marine products in different places, which would be interesting from an epidemiological point of view".

For CIFGA's technical team, this added guarantee will be a clear distinction for its customers and the global market:

"The existence of accredited reference materials should assume they are used by all official control agencies engaged in analysing marine biotoxin presence in fishing and aquaculture products before entering the food chain. It is a global market, as far as we know this accreditation is unique in the world, so we have a distinction over companies from other countries".