European Commission Joint Research Centre Directorate F – Health, Consumers and Reference Materials

One of the core activities of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service, is to provide harmonised accurate, reliable and fit-for-purpose measurement and quality assurance tools. They are necessary to facilitate the millions of measurements made by laboratories around the world in order to ensure the safety of our food, to check the status of our health or to prevent major accidents and contamination of the environment. The JRC develops, produces and distributes reference materials for establishing measurement scales, calibrating laboratory instruments, checking the trueness of measurement results and as benchmarks in the quality control of laboratories.