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Traceability myth #1: Consumers want transparency

Consumers want transparency.  It’s a phrase I hear all the time in supply chain and food safety circles.  Ask consumers if they want transparency and the answer is overwhelmingly ‘yes’.  It seems obvious; transparency equals knowledge, knowledge equals informed decisions, informed decisions result in good purchasing practices and good purchasing practices are a win for both consumers and suppliers.  But is that how food purchasing really works?

If consumers say they want transparency, and in a study by BBMG, GlobeScan and SustainAbility  a total 82% of consumers reported that “ingredient transparency is a very important or important factor” when shopping for food and beverages, why is it that ingredient transparency remains relatively unusual for most food products?

As a young food technologist working for a large snack food manufacturer, I learnt a valuable lesson in understanding consumer behaviour; those of us in marketing and product development jobs were very good at imagining the wants and preferences of our core consumers.  We were almost always wrong.  I was lucky enough to work for an organisation that was willing to spend money on focussed, in-depth and product-specific market research and we used that research to refine our product offerings and strengthen our brands.  What we learnt was that our own white-collar preferences were quite unlike the preferences of our core consumers and that self-reported attitudes to products almost never aligned with actual purchasing behaviour.  When it was time for consumers to select a bag of snacks from a retail store shelf, the qualities that we had been focussing on in our product development laboratory contributed very little to the decisions that were made.

I see the same thing in the current commentary of food safety and integrity professionals.  Traceability and transparency are important to food professionals and this is likely to be reflected in our food purchasing habits.    But for most people, food purchasing decisions are dominated by availability, cost, quality and sensory preferences.  Transparency is nice to have, but if it comes with a higher price tag it is unlikely to result in increased sales of a food product.  I don’t doubt that this is something most large food processors already understand.  We will continue to hear calls for supply chain transparency but we won’t be seeing it on an ordinary big-brand box of cookies any time soon.

Traceability myth #2; traceability is expensive

Traceability myth #3; traceability equals authenticity

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Vulnerability assessments are a waste of time according to this investigator

Vulnerability assessments are a hot topic in food safety at the moment, with Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) food safety standards set to include requirements for documented food fraud vulnerability assessments in the near future.  Most food safety and food integrity experts believe that vulnerability assessments are an important first step towards preventing fraudulent foods from reaching consumers.   However, in an interview with Food Safety News, Mitchell Weinberg, food fraud investigator and CEO of Inscatech describes food fraud vulnerability assessments as “frankly… a little bit of a waste of time.”  Mr Weinberg says that a food fraud vulnerability assessment is essentially about recording what you already know.  He explains that if a business is sourcing a food ingredient from a developing country, they should already know that it is more likely to be affected by fraud than if sourced locally.  Likewise, high value and high volume materials are more attractive to fraudsters.  Weinberg tells the interviewer:

“Just use common sense, figure out where the problem is, check it out… trust but verify.“

Weinberg is right; creating documented risk assessments of any kind is simply an exercise in writing down what we already know.  And common sense should be at the core of any risk assessment.  So is there any value in a documented vulnerability assessment?  

Absolutely!

  • A documented assessment is a record of who thought of what and when they thought of it.  It is evidence that fraud has been considered; it can be used to check that common sense was used in that consideration.  It can be audited, reviewed and updated.  It can be shared.
  • The process of creating a documented assessment can serve as a prompt to identify gaps in knowledge and provide an incentive to ‘fill in the gaps’.
  • A documented vulnerability assessment can be used to transfer knowledge.  Weinberg says creating a written assessment is making a record of what you already know; that is exactly what is needed when the person who made the assessment changes jobs or has to explain supply chain risks to a stubborn Purchasing Manager.
  • Most food businesses manufacture hundreds of food products and many more hundreds of ingredients; comparing the vulnerability assessments of different products and materials is an effective way to prioritise fraud prevention actions.  While the ultimate aim is for no product to be compromised ever, we all have to start somewhere.

Read more about Vulnerability Assessments here.

To view the interview with Mitchell Weinberg, click here.

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Food fraud only affects expensive food, right?

Wrong!  While it’s pretty obvious that you could make an economic gain by bulking out an expensive food like caviar with something less expensive, it’s also possible to make economic gains by making tiny alterations to big-volume commodities.  Even switching just one or two percent of a bulk item like beef mince or rice with something cheaper can create a huge economic gain when sales are counted in the thousands or tens of thousands of tonnes.

Ground meat is one commodity that has been frequently affected by this kind of food fraud.  The adulterants are typically lower grade meat or offal from the same species or meat from a cheaper species.  This kind of adulteration is difficult, if not impossible for consumers to detect.

Rice is another commodity that, despite being relatively cheap, is also affected by economically motivated adulteration. The adulterants are reported to be plastic pieces, including thermal insulation materials, potato starch mixed with polymer resins and even pieces of paper rolled to look like grains.  This type of fraud relies on transient and poorly documented supply chains; the person who ultimately tries to eat the rice will detect the fraud in most cases – although there are reports of people suffering digestive problems after consumption – however the source of the adulteration usually proves impossible to trace.

If rice adulteration was occurring on a big scale in Europe I suspect that increasing the requirements for paperwork and trying to improve supply chain transparency would be the chosen strategy for those tackling the issue.  In the Philippines they have taken a more direct and – for now at least – more feasible approach.  They have developed a hand-held scanner that uses Raman spectroscopy to detect ‘fake’ rice by distinguishing between starch and styrene acrylonitrile copolymer.  Fast, cheap, easy and no paperwork needed.

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Why should I care about food fraud?

We care about food fraud

… because Aussie farmers who work hard to grow top quality specialty products suffer huge losses each time someone fraudulently passes off an inauthentic product as their own.  Read the story of East Gippsland farmer Peter Treasure whose Wuk Wuk brand beef has been exploited here.

…. because of Cheznye Emmons who was 23 when she died after drinking fake gin in Sumatra.  Read her story here.

… because your customers care about it.

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Organic almonds twice the price?

My friend loves to buy healthy, natural and organic food for her family.  They eat a couple of kilos of almonds per week.  Last week she decided to check out the organic almonds available for bulk purchase at a local natural food co-op (yes this is in an inner suburb of Sydney, how’d you guess?).  The organic almonds were over twice as expensive at the co-op than if she had bought them from one of the big supermarkets.

Are they worth it?  Maybe… she really likes the idea of buying organic food.

Are they authentic?  Who knows? If the organic almonds are selling for around $30 per kg and the supermarket almonds are selling for $15 per kg then an unscrupulous supplier could make some easy money by adding just 10% ‘non-organic’ almonds to each lot of organic.  Do I think the local organic co-op would do such a thing?  No, I don’t think they would.  Do I think that there are people in their supply chain who might be tempted to take advantage of the premium price of organic food by acting fraudulently? Absolutely.

So are organic almonds vulnerable to food fraud?  Yes.  But how do you know if your almonds are authentic?  And what are the consequences it they are not?