EU 2017-2158 Acrylamide

Hello,

I have some questions on how to interpret the legislation (EU) 2017/2158.
For example, the allowed threshold for "other" bread (f.eks. rye) is double that of wheat bread.
For cereals, it says that "The cereal present in the largest quantity determines the category.". However, bread is not included here.
Considering this, as well as the fact that rye contains more asparagine than wheat, I'm wondering how we should evaluate, say a bread containing 30 % wheat and 20 % rye? Under the 50 [µg/kg]- or the 100 [µg/kg]-limit? 

Does anyone have any experience with this? 

Do we have a definition of "wheat based bread" vs "bread other than wheat based bread"? 

Thanks,
Sigrid

This is entirely arbitrary and not on any legal basis, but I would define "wheat-based bread" as bread where the majority of cereal ingredients is wheat-based.

I would consider a 30% wheat, 20% rye bread to be wheat based.

Do your customers have specific requirements you can match?

When in doubt, err on the side of caution and use the lower limit.

I can't comment with bread but I have experience with acrylamide legislation in other sectors and my one note of caution is all the competent authorities are behaving differently.  So in the UK what would be considered a benchmark exceedance which you'd look into your process and understand more, in Belgium would be a recall.  I do hope that the different countries can get alignment at some point but in the meantime, I'm not sure if you have a "home authority" based system in Norway but if you do, or if you have a good relationship with your local competent authority it might be worth asking them their opinion as getting the wrong one and applying excessively stringent limits could result in recall.

As for the limits being different?  I could be wrong but I can only say I was told that the limits came out of what was reasonably achievable.  I.e. big surveys were undertaken with testing of different baked / fried items at higher risk of acrylamide and a limit was chosen on the basis of that data which wasn't necessarily the average but potentially below that.  I'm unsure if that's true but if it is, it's a limit based on statistics not risk which you could argue whether that's right or wrong.  I err to the side of thinking it's right in that the known food safety limits aren't really known (yet) so in the meantime, this approach limits exposure to what some manufacturers had been able to achieve (so should be reasonably practicable.)  But if true it makes recall on the basis of benchmark exceedance even more nonsensical but still, I'd cover yourselves and make sure you know what category is the right one just in case.