BNN Monitoring of fruit and vegetables

Unique worldwide is that the companies exchange their analysis results, naming their suppliers. The BNN monitoring brings decisive improvements for quality management in the natural foods market:

• Data on pesticide contamination of organically produced fruits and vegetables is collected and systematically processed.

• Contaminations or mixtures with conventional crops can be detected and the deficiencies eliminated.

• Intensive cause research can uncover previously unknown weaknesses in cultivation, transport, and storage and stop them.

• Fraud cases can be efficiently cleared up.

• Suspicious suppliers can be quickly identified and kept off the market or excluded.

Thus, the BNN monitoring leads to an efficient protection against consumer deception.

Every pesticide residue detection results in a cause research. This way, cultivation errors or gaps in quality assurance and process control can be detected and stopped. In this way, the project leads to significant improvements in quality assurance at all levels.

The BNN monitoring for fruits and vegetables is open to all interested suppliers of fruits and vegetables in the natural foods trade.

As part of the BNN monitoring for fruits and vegetables in the natural foods trade, around 13,000 samples of organically produced fruits and vegetables have been tested for pesticides since June 2003. In 95 percent of the samples, there was no reason for complaints - in the overwhelming majority of these samples, the laboratories did not even find traces of pesticides. The legal maximum limit was exceeded in only 1.0 percent of all samples that were examined as part of the BNN monitoring.

BNN-Focus

In addition to the sampling-based and risk-oriented monitoring of GMOs and TM, and the resulting results, BNN-Focus - as the name suggests - focuses on specific focus topics. The goal is to increase the size of the evaluable datasets by adding (anonymized) analysis data from various BNN-approved laboratories, in order to take advantage of the improved data quality.

The focus is set by the companies themselves: topics that are just "on the horizon" or where there is a high need for clarification and information (e.g. ethylene oxide) are the subject of meetings that take place several times a year (via Zoom).