That's awesome, I love hearing about applied technology like that, thank you! I wonder what they do with the discard pile? Contaminated soil, use of pesticides

That's awesome, I love hearing about applied technology like that, thank you! I wonder what they do with the discard pile? Contaminated soil, use of pesticides containing dangerous metals, and leaching from manufacturing equipment and packaging are the main sources of heavy metals in baby formula. We should be testing those aspects like soil down to the per square meter samples, production line sampling, and packaging sampling, all as an integral part of the supply chain quality assurance process. The better testing methodologies for heavy metals in food are atomic absorption spectrophotometry (AAS), inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES), or inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the operational details to understand whether those methodologies can be packaged into a reliable, accurate, precise miniaturized form factor aimed specifically at testing formula to simplify the sampling aspects. I imagine sampling contamination might be a big issue with a miniaturized tester, along with an entire host of other challenges. There might even be limits of physics I'm unaware of that entirely prohibit miniaturization; the test equipment I'm aware of are benchtop at best in size, not handheld with maybe a smartphone front-end (to leave a screen out of the BOM).