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Massive fraud in U.S. antibiotic-free meat

Consumers perceive antibiotic-free meat as a healthier, more ethical choice than meat from animals raised with antibiotics and pay higher prices for such meat. However, investigations reveal that many ‘antibiotic-free’ products in the United States are not what they claim to be.

I previously shared shocking figures released by the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) based on the results of a 2023 testing program that included 189 samples from 84 slaughter establishments in 24 states.

The FSIS found antibiotic residues in liver and kidney samples of 20% of cattle destined for the ‘Raised without antibiotics’ (RWA) market.

That is, approximately 20% of US beef claimed to be raised without antibiotics was being marketed with false claims.

🍏 Find my original report here 🍏

What surprised me, when I stumbled upon that data, published in August 2024, was that it had not provoked any kind of outrage – or in fact any response at all – in mainstream media outlets.

Surely this was a scandal that consumers would want to know about?

It didn’t help that the figures were not published as a report but buried in the ‘Background’ section of an FSIS page announcing a comment period on a guideline for meat labelling claims.

A woman in safety glasses and lab coat is holding up a vial of red liquid.
The USDA’s FSIS sampled material from 189 cattle destined for the ‘Raised Without Antibiotics’ market and found antibiotic residues in 20% of animals. Image: DC Studio on Freepik.

 

This was not the first time antibiotic residues had been found in RWA meat and cattle. In 2022, researchers from the George Washington University reported that 15% of US RWA cattle contained antibiotic residues. Also in 2022, advocacy group Farm Forward found antibiotics in RWA beef purchased from Whole Foods.

In letters from the USDA to the companies found to be engaging in deceptive behaviour, obtained under freedom of information by Farm Forward, the USDA told the companies they may have produced misbranded product but would not be subject to any enforcement action.

In 2025, Farm Forward publicly named the companies with positive results, revealing that antibiotics were detected in beef declared ‘Raised without antibiotics’ from three of the four largest meat processors in the US.

In their April 2025 report, Farm Forward said JBS and Cargill continue to sell RWA, while Tyson abandoned some of its RWA brands in July 2024, after the USDA tests.

Smaller companies are also alleged to be continuing to use questionable claims, with Farm Forward stating that three smaller brands that market their meat as “no antibiotics ever” and “raised without antibiotics” continue to sell meat despite receiving positive results in the USDA survey and without announcing any changes to procedures, nor sharing any subsequent test results to verify their claims.

The USDA, which must approve all RWA claims before they may be used by a company, has not made any changes to its approval process and continues to rely on producers’ self-reporting of antibiotic use.

However, the FSIS states it now “strongly encourages meat and poultry establishments to substantiate such claims by implementing a routine sampling and testing program to test for the use of antibiotics in animals prior to slaughter.” Or, as an alternative, to obtain third-party certification that involves antibiotic testing.

This means that meat marketed as ‘antibiotic-free’ or ‘raised without antibiotics’ in the U.S. may continue to be affected by false and misleading claims. The USDA does not publicly disclose violations, nor penalise companies for mislabelling. As a result, consumers continue to pay premium prices for meat that may not be true to label.

Antibiotic-free meat: the global context

Antibiotics are used in meat production to prevent and treat bacterial infections in animals. In the United States, antibiotics are also used to promote growth and improve feed efficiency, allowing farmers to produce more meat with less feed.

However, the use of antibiotics as growth promoters is effectively banned in many other countries worldwide. Such bans aim to limit antibiotic use and curb the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, which pose major threats to public health.

In the U.S., the meat industry accounts for a significant portion of all antibiotics used in that country. For example, in 2020 it purchased 69% of the U.S. supply of medically important antibiotics, with just 31% being used for humans.

There is no publicly available information about the proportion of antibiotics that are used for prophylactic purposes, such as growth promotion, compared to treatment of already-sick animals in the U.S. However, compared to the European Union, the U.S. uses nearly double the quantity of antibiotics for livestock, based on 2020 figures.

‘Antibiotic-free’ meat is supposed to come from animals that have not received antibiotics at any stage in their lives. In the U.S., these products are labelled ‘Raised Without Antibiotics’ (RWA), a claim that is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) but which relies on self-attestation by meat producers.

Theoretically, under the USDA RWA program, if an animal falls ill and requires antibiotics, it is removed from the program by the farm operator, and its meat should not be sold under the antibiotic-free label.

Globally, only 20% of countries still use antimicrobials as growth promoters in meat production. In the European Union, antibiotics have not been permitted for use as growth-promoters since 2006, with China following suit in 2020.

There are partial restrictions in Australia, Canada, Uruguay, and Brazil, with most countries outlawing the use of antibiotics that are medically important for humans for use as livestock growth-promoters, while allowing other antibiotics to be used for such purposes.

A loophole related to the labelling and registration of feed additives exists in some countries. Feeds may contain undeclared low doses of antimicrobials, which are then unknowingly administered by farmers and veterinarians to their animals.

Globally, false claims of ‘antibiotic-free’ status may occur in any market where consumers pay a premium for meat labelled as such.

In short: USDA testing of animals destined for the ‘Raised Without Antibiotics’ market (RWA) revealed 20% of animals contained antibiotic residues 🍏 Companies were not named and no enforcement action was taken, despite the USDA telling companies they may have sold misbranded product 🍏 FSIS says it strongly encourages meat and poultry establishments to implement testing programs or engage with certifiers that use testing programs, however this is not mandatory 🍏 Purchasers of meat marketed as ‘antibiotic-free’ or ‘raised without antibiotics’ should be aware that these claims could be false 🍏

Main sources (minor sources are hyperlinked in the text):

Gillespie, K (2025) Is “Antibiotic-Free” Meat Really Antibiotic-Free?, Farm Forward [online]. Available for download from https://www.farmforward.com/publications/is-antibiotic-free-meat-really-antibiotic-free/

USDA (2023). Availability of FSIS Guideline on Substantiating Animal-Raising or Environment-Related Labeling Claims | Food Safety and Inspection Service. [online] Available at: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/policy/federal-register-rulemaking/federal-register-notices/availability-fsis-guideline.

 

This article was originally published at The Rotten Apple – a weekly newsletter for food professionals

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A faked inspection mark prompts a recall in the US

While food fraud can result in food safety problems, it’s very rare to see a recall for food fraud that is initiated prior to any reports of consumer illness. So I was very interested to see a recall in the USA in mid-2025 associated with food fraud.

The agency that initiated the recall, the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), said they were concerned that the recalled products posed a risk to consumers. It designated the recall a Class I, which is the most serious classification for recalls by that agency, reserved for hazards with a reasonable probability of causing serious adverse health consequences or death.

Following the agency decision, a manufacturer in the US announced it would recall 32,000 pounds (14.5 metric tonnes) of sausage, pork chops and ribs after it was caught faking the USDA mark of inspection that must be carried on all meat products manufactured in the United States.

The product bore a false establishment number, which made it seem like it had been produced under the supervision of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspectors.

The recalled products bore false marks of inspection and carried the establishment number EST. 1785. There is no such establishment registered with the USDA.

A photo of one of the recalled foods with a red circle highlighting the false USDA establishment number.
One of the recalled foods with the false USDA establishment number. Image: FSIS

 

What made this unusual among food fraud incidents is the recall was initiated even though there had been no reports of consumer illness or injury from these products.

The recall was initiated because the FSIS considers food produced without inspection to be dangerous, saying it “may contain undeclared allergens, harmful bacteria, or other contaminants that put consumer health and safety at risk”.

Sadly, in 2024 we saw evidence that FSIS inspection is perhaps less effective than the agency seems to imagine when meat products produced WITH inspection caused the deaths of 10 people from Listeria.

The ready-to-eat liverwurst linked that Listeria outbreak was made at a USDA-registered establishment by Boar’s Head. Before the outbreak, the facility had been described as filthy and contaminated, with condensation dripping onto food, mold, insects, food residues and “general filth” by inspectors representing the FSIS – the very people supposedly positioned in the facility to prevent contamination and protect consumers.

So call me a cynic, but a relatively small selection of not-ready-to-eat food produced without FSIS inspection seems no more risky than a truckload of ready-to-eat liverwurst produced with FSIS inspection.

However, I digress. The interesting thing to note with this recall is that the root cause is fraud. The legal framework in this case is the Food, Drugs and Cosmetics Act (FD&C Act (1938)), which considers food marketed with false information to be “misbranded”, making it illegal in the United States.

Beyond the FD&C Act, and using my definition of food fraud, which is “deception, using food for economic gain” this incident is an example of food fraud: the company sold their products with a fake trust symbol – the USDA establishment number – and in the process acted deceitfully to achieve economic gain, in this case by gaining market access that would not have been possible without the false USDA mark.

From a lawyerly perspective, proving ‘fraud’ in a court of law usually requires proof of intent. That is, the prosecutor has to show that the deceptive behaviour was done on purpose and was not a simple mistake.

We don’t have the same burden of proof when we discuss food fraud as non-lawyers. However, I do consider intention when deciding what to include in my weekly food fraud reports for The Rotten Apple.

I use my expertise to make a judgment about whether a deception could be intentional. If I judge an incident is more likely than not to be the result of an intentional act by someone in the supply chain, then I consider it ‘food fraud’.

Using fish species substitution as an example, the mislabelling of cheap fish like tilapia as expensive fish like Red Snapper is likely to be intentional because it gains the perpetrator extra money. Doing it the other way around – misrepresenting expensive fish as cheap fish – doesn’t result in a gain and is more likely to be accidental than intentional.

In the case of the fake USDA establishment number, I judge the deception to be intentional, with the understanding that this could be difficult to prove in a fraud case in a court of law.

But it is good to know that someone was paying attention and checking the authenticity of the establishment mark on these products and that the agency was willing to take action against the business. If only they had been so proactive at Boar’s Head.

In short: A recall has occurred after authorities learned of the fraudulent use of an establishment number on meat products in the USA 🍏 The recall was initiated to protect consumer safety, although no one was sickened 🍏 This is a rare example of a potential food safety problem from food fraud being identified by a government agency proactively, before anyone was harmed 🍏

Source: FSIS USDA Recall Notice

 

This article was originally published at The Rotten Apple – a weekly newsletter for food professionals

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Tip-truck to table: waste diversion fraud

Organised crime groups are funnelling relabelled food back onto shelves

I’ve been wondering … what exactly happened to the 160,000 pounds (72,600 kg) of frozen shrimp that were recalled in the US in mid-2025 in relation to the radioactivity scare? Yes, it was recalled, but what happened to it after that?

What did the recalling companies and retailers actually do with each of the hundreds of thousands of 1.25 lb (570 g) bags of product? Did they empty the contents of every one and shred each package so it couldn’t be reused? Did they arrange for secure disposal with a trusted waste company and require a certificate of destruction? Or did they just dump them in a skip bin and let a contractor take them all away?

And why does this matter anyway?

It matters because the results of Operation Opson XIV have just landed. And they show that waste diversion crimes are at “unprecedented levels”.

Reminder: Operation Opson is an annual law enforcement initiative coordinated by INTERPOL and Europol with the aim of detecting and removing counterfeit, substandard, and fraudulent food and beverages from the market, and dismantling organised crime groups linked to such activities.

What are waste diversion crimes?

Waste diversion crimes in food involve illegally redirecting food, drink, or feed that is marked for disposal—such as expired, rejected, or unsafe goods—back into the human food supply chain through acts like relabelling or repackaging.

Photorealistic landscape image of identical cans with altered expiry labels in a warehouse.
Operation Opson XIV uncovered criminal-network- linked waste diversion crimes at unprecedented levels.

What do waste diversion crimes look like?

Here’s a hypothetical…

What if a seafood distributor involved in the recent US recalls decided the frozen shrimp was too valuable to throw away? What if senior management decided to make a few extra dollars by relabelling the cartons of product that had been returned to them rather than destroying them as required?

Could the distributor simply rebrand them or oversticker the cartons, add new expiry dates and keep them in the freezer until everyone has forgotten about the recalls, then sell them months or years later?

The short answer is yes.

It’s illegal and immoral, of course, but, with the shrimp worth $4 to $10 per pound, even a small quantity handled in this way can generate meaningful profits out of thin air – especially if the distributor received credits or refunds for the recalled stock.

Frozen seafood lasts many years – a man in Singapore was sentenced in 2023 for crimes related to storing frozen seafood that was almost 10 years past its expiry date – so there is plenty of scope for crime here.

In a different scenario, let’s imagine the seafood distributor does the right thing and sends the recalled shrimp for disposal.

In this scenario, what if the waste disposal company somehow had links to organisations that could relabel or repackage the shrimp and sell it back into legitimate supply chains later?

What if the waste disposal company didn’t just have links to criminals but was actually owned by an organised crime group that also owned repackaging facilities, warehouses and legitimate food distribution companies – a vertically integrated (mostly) legitimate supply chain? In this case, diverting the recalled shrimp back to retailers and restaurants would be easy.

But surely that’s too far-fetched, I hear you say. Sorry, I’m afraid it isn’t.

And anyway, Operation Opson is mostly in Europe. Surely this sort of thing isn’t happening in places like the USA? Sorry, I’m afraid it is.

The following story is not a hypothetical, but a real incident that happened in the United States.

The roadside spilling of a truckload of Skittles confectionery on its way to a cattle ranch, where it was destined for animal feed, made news headlines in 2017. When people protested that cows should not be fed Skittles, the brand owner, Mars, told reporters that the confectionery had been sent for destruction, saying they had no idea how the candies ended up on their way to a farm1.

Waste disposal crimes today

Things have changed since 2017. The price of food has increased dramatically, food security has fallen significantly, even in wealthy countries. There is also a growing body of evidence that documents the involvement of organised crime groups in food, in addition to typical crime sectors such as drugs and guns.

Today’s global landscape has made waste diversion crimes more attractive, not less.

In 2023, European law enforcement agencies dismantled two large crime groups that were reselling expired food after re-printing expiry dates or applying new labels, with 27 people arrested for their roles in a million-euro operation based in Lithuania, and selling food across multiple countries. They also arrested 3 people in Italy. In total, the agencies confiscated more than 1.5 million food and beverage items in the operations. The Lithuanian operation had been active since 2021.

At the time, Europol told reporters, “The phenomenon [of waste diversion crime] is new in its scale and diffused across several EU member states,”

Europol assured the industry that the criminals were working in food disposal, not food production, saying “There is no involvement of food producers, as intermediate suppliers or other entities working in food disposal are used as facilitators in this particular criminal activity.”

“Entities working in food disposal are used as facilitators in this particular criminal activity.” Europol (2023), via Securing Industry

In 2025, the situation seems worse. The most recent Operation Opson, Opson XIV, has just concluded, with 13 organised crime groups disrupted, 101 arrest warrants issued and €95 million worth of food and beverages seized.

One of the major trends for Opson XIV, said Europol, was finding waste disposal companies infiltrated by organised crime groups, which were using the waste companies to gain access to food destined for destruction.

This is not a new phenomenon, but this year, says Europol, the scale is “unprecedented”.

Examples everywhere?

Have you ever seen food that’s been through the waste diversion chain? You probably have, without even knowing it.

I can think of three incidents that could be linked to organised crime in waste providers.

1. Dodgy Diet Coke

‘Not right’-tasting Diet Coke discovered in London in 2025 could be expired product fraudulently reintroduced to the market – artificial sweeteners in diet soft drinks lose their sweetness, rendering old drinks tasting like soda water. Read more on the Fake Coke scandal.

2. Jars of herbs containing glass

In 2023, I reported on a waste disposal company in the Netherlands that was selling food products it had promised to destroy. The crimes were uncovered after a consumer was injured by glass in a jar of herbs from a batch sent for destruction.

The waste company was providing declarations of destruction which were false. A key person at the waste company had previously been convicted of environmental crimes.

3. Spaza shop mystery deaths

In January, I wrote about the thousands of unexplained deaths in South Africa attributed to food purchased from spaza shops (small, independent and lightly regulated retail outlets).

A key complaint about the food from these shops is that it is often expired. Much of it appears to have been illegally imported by foreign nationals operating the stores without proper immigration status.

Video footage of a raid on one shop showed foods such as savoury crackers in transparent inner packs without their outer packaging or labels. Because they are missing traceability elements such as outers and labels, these foods could be from non-legitimate supply chains.

Officially, it’s said that Spaza shop owners use collective purchasing practices to keep prices low; however, it’s possible that groups of spaza shop owners source their products from overseas suppliers with links to waste disposal companies.

Takeaways for food professionals

Enforcement agencies are discovering the presence of organised crime groups in food waste disposal operations at unprecedented levels. Food that is intended for destruction and disposal is being diverted back into the human food supply chain after expiry dates or entire labels are altered or replaced.

Purchasers of packaged foods, such as grocery stores, independent retailers and food service outlets like takeaways, restaurants and cafes should obtain their supplies from legitimate, authorised stockists and wholesalers.

Manufacturers should be vigilant when disposing of packaged or branded materials.

Supplier approval processes should include the vetting of waste disposal contractors. Background checks are recommended – for example, have key personnel got a history of criminal convictions (as was the case in the Netherlands example)?

Certificates of disposal/destruction should be verified where possible.

As a former-soft-drink-company-employee told me in response to my Diet Coke story, “The correct disposal of branded waste and reject materials is a key factor for limiting the opportunity for these crimes.”

When purchasing food as a business or consumer, be on the lookout for:

  • Food that seems too old, despite being within date
  • Outer cartons and individual packs that are more scuffed, damaged or worn than expected
  • New suppliers that appear unexpectedly and offer products from multiple disparate brands, sometimes at lower-than-usual prices
  • Corner shops/spaza shops/tuck shops selling food in inner packs marked ‘not for retail sale’, or without exterior packages that would carry the batch codes or date markings
  • Packages with foreign language labels and no local information.

If in doubt about any such food, keep a sample and contact enforcement agencies and the brand owner to describe your concerns. Big food companies will investigate and take action against waste disposal crimes affecting their brands.

… and be on the lookout for suspicious frozen shrimp in the US for the next year or two…

In short: The involvement of organised crime groups in waste disposal operations was found at unprecedented levels in the latest Europol anti-food crime operation, Operation Ospon XIV 🍏 Food intended for destruction is being diverted back into the human food supply chain, often with altered expiry dates or new labels 🍏 Purchasers are warned to be aware and to report suspect products to the brand owner and enforcement agencies for investigation 🍏

Main source:

Europol (2025) Counterfeit and substandard food worth EUR 95 million seized in global operation (Operation Opson XIV). Available online: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/counterfeit-and-substandard-food-worth-eur-95-million-seized-in-global-operation

 

This article was originally published at The Rotten Apple – a weekly newsletter for food professionals

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Case study: Double brokering leads to disappearing tequila

A food fraud case study

In the past, I’ve told you that food-waste-diversion crimes are being detected at unprecedented levels in Europe, and described how enforcement actions coordinated by Europol had dismantled 13 organised crime groups in their most recent anti-food-fraud operation.

This week’s case study explores diversion-style crime from a North American perspective. This case doesn’t involve the diversion of waste back into the supply chain, but, like those discovered in Europe, it does involve an organised crime group.

When: November 2024

What: 24,000 bottles of Santo Tequila worth more than $1 million.

How: Criminals used non-existent trucking companies and a process called ‘double-brokering’ to gain access to the goods, ensuring they were never delivered to their intended destination.

Details:

In November 2024, a shipment of premium Santo Tequila left Mexico on its way to a warehouse in Pennsylvania, via Texas. The shipment comprised the entire batch of a special lot of tequila that had taken 3 years to make, especially for the 2024 holiday season.

After crossing the border into Texas, the consignment was moved to two semi trucks and entrusted to a logistics company hired by Santo Spirits to deliver the tequila to its warehouse in Pennsylvania, a 2.5-day drive north.

The logistics company hired a trucking company to make the delivery. It outsourced the job to two other trucking companies through a bidding process called double brokering. Drivers hired by the second companies collected the trailers and drove away with the tequila.

In Pennsylvania, the tequila did not arrive as scheduled, and Santo was told there had been a mechanical problem with a truck. A few days later, the shipment still hadn’t arrived. Santo was told the mechanical problem had been worse than first believed, but the delivery would arrive soon, around 5 days later than scheduled.

GPS tracking provided by the logistics company showed the truck was definitely en route. A few days later, Santo was told the truck’s GPS showed it was near the warehouse in Pennsylvania.

But the truck – and the tequila – never arrived.

Investigators discovered the trucking companies had told the drivers to take the trucks to Los Angeles. The trucking companies were fake businesses, with fake online profiles, phoney letterheads, email addresses and phone numbers, and possibly operated by people outside the USA.

The emails about the mechanical issues were falsehoods, and the GPS tracking had been faked.

The drivers, however, were genuine, hired by the fake trucking companies.

The bigger picture:

This type of cargo theft, involving redirection of goods to other locations by remote operators, has increased by more than 1,200% in four years, according to a cargo theft investigator who assisted with the Santo Tequila case.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)’s special cargo theft unit says that in such cases, the goods are usually sold online or in stores. A recent ‘bust’ found $4.5 million worth of stolen goods in a warehouse.

The outcome:

Santo Spirits was luckier than most. The LAPD cargo theft unit tracked down one of the drivers, who told them he had been directed to drop the cargo in the San Fernando Valley. One truckload – eleven thousand bottles – of the missing batch were found at a warehouse in southeast Los Angeles two weeks after the heist. The other truckload was never found.

Source:

Alfonsi, S. and Chasan, A. (2025). Two truckloads of Guy Fieri’s tequila vanished last year. It shed light on a growing new crime. [online] CBSnews.com. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/double-brokering-guy-fieri-tequila-heist-60-minutes/.

🍏 Want more case studies? Check out the Food Safety Knowledge Vault on The Rotten Apple🍏

This article was originally published at The Rotten Apple – a weekly newsletter for food professionals

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Tomato paste scandal: Chinese origins in ‘Italian’ products exposed

In December 2024, allegations of forced labour in the tomato puree supply chains of major British retailers caused shockwaves in Europe.

On the surface, the allegations appeared massively shocking. Firstly, the purees were portrayed as the products of the torture and abuse of Chinese religious minorities. Secondly, the news coverage implied large-scale fraud with respect to the origin of the purees, many of which were marketed with the word ‘Italian’ on the pack.

It seemed that British and German supermarkets were selling ‘Italian’ tomato purees that contained Chinese tomato puree supplied by companies that relied on forced labour.

Shocking.

But when I sat down to share the news with you in Issue 168, I found the legal situation was so murky that I actually couldn’t pin a definite ‘food fraud’ label on any of it.

The BBC, reporting on the issue, used very careful language when referring to the allegations, saying “[some products] are likely to contain Chinese tomatoes” and asserting that “most Chinese tomatoes come from the Xinjiang region, where their production is linked to forced labour by Uyghur and other largely Muslim minorities.”

Most of the details that would have helped to reveal whether this was a case of food fraud were not shared publicly or were not known to the BBC at the time. For example, we weren’t told how much Chinese puree was in any of the products – were they 100% Chinese or only 50%, for example?

We could not decipher the degree of fraud (or not) related to the ‘Italian’ claims, since the BBC did not share the exact claims on the packs of products that were found to contain some Chinese tomatoes.

And finally, while the BBC published interviews with workers who had picked tomatoes under forced labour conditions in China, the information it published was not direct evidence of forced labour in the supply chain of any of the puree products mentioned in the story.

Aside: The most compelling part of the 2024 story, for me, was that one of the Italian manufacturers that supplied some British supermarkets, the company that made ten of the seventeen samples which contained Chinese tomatoes, had previously been accused of fraud by Italian authorities for falsely claiming its products contained ‘100% Italian tomato’.

That’s right, the Italian company supplying ‘Italian’ tomato puree that allegedly contained Chinese tomatoes had been accused of fraud by Italian food authorities three years prior.

Background checks, anyone? A simple Google search of the company name followed by the word tomato revealed instant red flags: two of the top three search results were stories about the company’s 2021 brush with Italian food fraud investigators.

After the BBC report, all seemed quiet on the tomato paste front.

Not so.

The tomato paste market underwent a huge upheaval following the BBC investigation. Suddenly, everyone was paying attention to the origin of their tomato paste. No one wanted tomato paste from China and the Italian paste suppliers who had been importing it for use in their products stopped buying it.

In the months that followed, Italian processors reduced imports of tomato concentrate from China by 76%, according to the CEO of Mutti, a leading Italian maker of tomato purée and passata, leaving China with a huge stockpile of 600,000 to 700,000 tonnes of tomato paste, equivalent to around 6 months of exports.

Tomato News reports that while Chinese tomato exports to Western Europe and Italy have fallen dramatically, the surplus is being taken up by countries in Eastern Europe, Central America, and the Far East. Production in China has also fallen dramatically, with less than half the volume of tomatoes expected this year compared to 2024.

So, with China no longer supplying major markets in Western Europe, where will those markets get their tomato paste – that all-important ingredient for pizzas, pastas, ready meals and soups?

Can Italian tomato growers step up production to meet demand? Or will the supply-demand gap be so large that fraud becomes almost inevitable?

Tomato paste production in Xinjiang ramped up rapidly to 11 million tonnes in 2024 and is projected to fall to 3.7 million tonnes in 2025

 

Food authenticity expert Professor Chris Elliott believes the current situation is ripe for fraud, suggesting the following scenarios are possible:

  1. The large stockpile of tomato paste in China could be transhipped or reprocessed in third countries to conceal its Chinese origins, making it palatable for Western European markets.
  2. Other false claims of origin could be made about tomatoes from other major growing areas such as Spain, Portugal, Chile and Iran.
  3. Lower-quality paste may be blended into higher-value pastes (noting this is not fraud unless accompanied by deceptive claims about quality or origin).
  4. Undeclared fillers and diluents, such as starches or sugars, could be used to extend the volume of scarce non-Chinese tomato paste.
  5. Undeclared and unauthorised colourants could be added to enhance the appearance of low-quality, diluted or age-degraded pastes.

With tomato paste having a long shelf life, these fraud risks will remain for as long as surplus stock remains in China and while European market demand is unsatisfied. And that could be for years to come.

Key takeaway

We are currently in a perfect storm for tomato paste fraud. There is an oversupply of Chinese-made tomato paste and an undersupply of genuine Italian tomato paste. This creates vulnerabilities, particularly for products marketed with specific country of origin claims. Possible frauds include transhipping and reprocessing to disguise the true origin of Chinese pastes, other false origin claims, blending, dilution, addition of fillers and other adulterants to extend the volume or enhance the apparent value of low-quality pastes. Also note that Chinese-origin tomato pastes have been linked to labour violations and modern slavery.

 

Read more:

🍏 Tomato Puree Fraud by Big Name Retailers? | Issue 168 🍏

This article was originally published at The Rotten Apple  – weekly newsletter for food professionals.