Das Projekt "Securing the spices and herbs commodity chains in Europe against deliberate, accidental or natural biological and chemical contamination (SPICED)" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung durchgeführt. The food chain security from the primary production to the consumer ready food against deliberate, accidental or natural (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) contamination stands in close correlation to the food safety of herbs and spices. The major aim of SPICED is a throughout characterization of the heterogeneous spice and herb matrices and their respective intra- and interplant production- and supply chain. Special attention hereby should be paid to relevant biological and chemical hazards that can lead to major deliberate, accidental or natural contaminations in the food supply chain. Furthermore, the knowledge about biological hazard properties and on-site high throughput diagnostic methods for their appropriate detection should be improved in order to avoid (industrial) chemical adulteration and to guarantee the authenticity of spices and herbs by evaluation and optimization of non-targeted fingerprinting methods. A further focus of the project will be the improvement of the alerting-, reporting- and decontamination systems as well as the development of standard techniques to ensure prevention and response on a high quality level. The consortium will evaluate the most important spices and herbs that cause or could be used as natural, accidental or deliberate contaminants, depending on the consumed quantity and the relative frequency of natural or accidental contaminations. SPICED will focus on pathogens based on their frequency of natural occurrence, possible impact on human health, and relevance for food terrorism. The entire project has been planned for 36 months and brings together experts and scientists from 11 different areas. The spice and herbs primary production and supply chain is very heterogeneous since most of the condiments are imported from non-European countries. The SPICED-Team comprises the most important players of the European spice market from the major importer (Germany), the major re-exporter (Netherlands) to the leading paprika producing country (Hungary). The results gained by SPICED will form a solid base to develop information material from advice ranging, brochures and other supporting documents to workshops for scientific researchers.