Letter to the editor

In a recent article published in the Journal of Food Quality and Hazards Control 1 (2014) 36-40, an interesting molecu-lar approach based on DNA detection was described to iden-tify chicken meat within supposed commercial (both tradi-tional and industrial) beef burgers. The method was able to detect the fraudulent contamina-tion even with the presence of 0.1% of the indigenous meat. Cheaper meat or meat waste products are sometimes added to the first meat ingredient in the hamburger; however the high rates of observed contamination, open discussion about the need of more meticulous sanitary controls. I found that the described approach could be also of a big interest in veggies and fish/seafood burgers control. Indeed in some specific diets, meat is avoided which led to emerge of new burgers without meat ingredients. However, food adulteration can be observed within the food safety and quality control agencies. Taken in account the high demand for more transparency in food industry, the new molecular technique can be helpful as it offers specific, sensitive, fast and reliable way to detect undeclared chicken and beef meat in burgers.