A light-hearted look at fake products and brand rip-offs from around the world… Food fraud is a serious problem, but when fraudsters stumble on the English language the results are sometimes pretty funny…
Photo credits: You Tube user dj09C1
At Food Fraud Advisors, authenticity of food, drinks and supplements is our passion and our mission. Here’s why…
My recent article Traceability myth #1 ‘Consumers want transparency’ discussed how consumer attitudes to transparency are positive, but may not have much affect on purchasing decisions.
Traceability myth #2 explores the myth that traceability is expensive for food businesses. This myth is based on the belief that traceability can only be achieved through the use of specialised business software. Let’s explore this myth in more detail.
Specialised business software is expensive but it is not the only way to achieve traceability. Traceability is the ability to access information about all the ingredients of a food product down to the individual batch or lot of the ingredient, to understand the disposition of all the ingredients and intermediate materials within a production process and to know where the food product went after it was manufactured. The information should be accessible to the food business and able to be retrieved within four hours.
Why is traceability important? Safety of consumers is the number one reason for traceability; it allows fast and effective recall of food products that have been affected by unsafe raw materials or improper processing. Every food safety management system standard includes requirements for traceability. Traceability can also be a huge benefit to market access; put simply, if you have robust traceability systems in place, more retail and food service customers are going to be willing to purchase your foods. Thirdly, traceability comes with huge cost savings in the event of a recall or withdrawal situation; a food business that can accurately trace affected product down to individual lots can save huge sums of money by recalling only those lots that are affected. This can also have a positive affect on insurance premiums.
How to implement a traceability system without using expensive software? The most important thing you will need is a traceability ‘champion’ who is dedicated to the task and who has the support of top management. As the system is implemented it is this person who will check that things are working as they should, that information is being recorded and that their colleagues in the business understand the process and the reasoning behind it. A good first step is to start by editing production record worksheets, such as batch sheets and packing sheets and adding spaces to record a number or code that will identify each lot of finished product and intermediate product. This code should ‘follow’ the lot through the production process, any quality checks and all the way to dispatch. It should be able to be linked to the best before or use-by date on every pack; this can be done with a simple batch number book that contains a list of unique numbers and space to add date of manufacture, product and (afterwards) final disposition of the lot next to each number.
Production records will also need to be amended so that batch numbers or other unique identifiers for raw materials can be recorded. Records need to be kept for all ingredients, intermediate foods and primary packaging materials that go into the process. Personnel responsible for ‘batching’ or adding materials to the process will need to be trained and re-trained to remind them to record these numbers religiously; in a paper-based manual system, these operators are the difference between an effective traceability system and one that will be full of holes.
Raw materials and incoming goods systems are the next part of the implementation; if any of your materials are not supplied with a unique identifier or batch code you will need to create your own and attach it to each lot of material as it is received. This same code will need to accompany any portion of the material as it moves around the facility. Work in progress, re-work, faulty product and product that is on hold awaiting quality checks also need to be labelled.
The final piece of the puzzle is with the sales and dispatch operations; your operators will need to keep a record of which batch lots were dispatched to which customer. The result is a batch number book that contains a unique identifier for each lot of product, with the product and final disposition (sold, destroyed, discarded) accompanied by sets of records for incoming goods, production , quality checks, on-hold or destruction records and sales or dispatch records that can all be linked back to the numbers in the batch book.
Paper-based traceability systems can be simple and relatively inexpensive but they need constant vigilance to ensure that every person who is supposed to be recording batch numbers is doing so in a conscientious manner. All records should be cross checked by a supervisor before being filed and a traceability exercise should be conducted on each product line on a regular basis to make sure the system is working properly.
There are many advantages to be gained from an electronic traceability solution, because they typically allow for more efficient ordering and stock management processes, as well as removing much of the ‘fiddly’ and tedious work from the record-keeping processes and improving access to records. If you have a complex business or are working with materials with a short shelf life, business management software can be worth its weight in gold. However, paper-based systems can and do work very well and are perfectly capable of meeting the traceability requirements of the most picky customers and stringent standards. All you need is a champion.
Traceability myth #1; consumers want transparency
Traceability myth #3; traceability equals authenticity
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.
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!
Read more about Vulnerability Assessments here.
To view the interview with Mitchell Weinberg, click here.
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.