Bia Analytical Ltd
Bia Analytical Ltd is a UK food authentication testing laboratory set up to address concerns about economically motivated adulteration.We have developed industry-leading, cutting-edge methods to detect substitution or food adulteration across the supply chain. Our focus is on developing methods to detect adulteration in high-value or high-volume commodities such as herbs, spices, rice and oils etc.
Bia Analytical use spectroscopy and chemometric modelling to offer lab-based food authenticity testing and licensing of our lab-based models; Bespoke model development: where we build testing models to meet individual client needs; and we are developing our portable testing solution, which will allow clients to directly test for adulteration anywhere in their supply chain The overall aim of Bia Analytical is to provide a two-tier testing service of rapid remote testing supported by ISO 17025 accredited methods.
2020
Start Date
Belfast
Location
6
Employees
£310k
Grants
150k
Equity
The Journey
“The Bia Analytical founders were successful in getting a place on the first ICURe NxNW cohort where we used the training and financial support to travel and speak to over 100 different companies in order to validate our value proposition. We traveled to tradeshows in Turkey and Germany to speak to the manufacturers, to all the major UK supermarket headquarters, To regulators and laboratories in the US and Europe and to many food company sites around Europe gaining valuable input that allowed us to pivot our initial proposition in time for the options roundabout. Following further training from the NxNW team we pitched our ideas to the experts, at the options roundabout, who advised that we should move forward with a spin-out company.
Terry McGrath Founder and CTO Bia Analytical
Contact Form
Oregano Scandal
Prof Chris Elliott and his team at IGFS carried out a retail oregano study revealing that 25% of dried oregano is adulterated
InvestNI Funding
Funding for usage of handheld NIR device for detection of herb adulteration
Successful Seed Funding
InnovateUK for ICURe and additional funding secured
Bia Analytical Trademark
Star of portable device's R&D and chemometric model development
Open for Business!
Bia Analytical currently offer 15 models for in house and online testing
What companies had to say about the Innovate UK ICURe programme?
With more support from the NxNW team we successfully applied for follow-on funding from Innovate UK and once we secured our match funding from angel investors we got to work building the business early 2020.
Terry McGrath
Founder and CTO Bia Analytical
Future Goals
Bia Analytical have had an interesting journey to date having to dealing with a global pandemic, a financial crisis and a war that have all had major impacts on the food supply chain. We remain a valued partner to the food industry and our aim is to become the World leader in the development of future food quality, authenticity and safety analysis. We are currently offering food authenticity testing as a service laboratory and we are also currently running trials where we allow our clients to access our models remotely so they don’t need to send the samples to us. Moving forward we are working on a portable testing solution that will revolutionise authenticity testing, allowing samples to be analysed at the point of collection without the need to send back to a laboratory. We are expanding our product portfolio beyond authenticity testing to offer a more complete solution to our clients.