The importance of validation methods to facilitate the work of commodity laboratories

Globalization has increased the trade flow of regional products between countries, making nec-essary controls to guarantee the safety and authenticity of exported and imported food products. The ISO international certifications recommend traditional analytical chemistry methods to ensure the quality of analytical processes. In the last years, fast automatized methods were developed to approach new analytical problems (there are no recommended methods for determining all food components or toxins), ensure constant performance over time, and avoid the laborious traditional methods requiring professional personnel who know how to apply them. The purposes of vali-dating a chemical analysis method are to prove the adequacy of the procedure in question; document the operator's competence to conduct the work (by verifying the quality parameters obtained through appropriate procedures); provide sufficient data to define the control limits helpful in verifying compliance with the quality parameters during daily work. The validation process must guarantee that the sensitivity of the new tests is equivalent to that of the official methods, their application to the matrix of interest, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. The present work examines the methods used to validate new analytical tests and the statistical approaches used to achieve the goal.