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Where’s my tricorder?

We would all love to have a magic machine that can tell us exactly what is in a food or a health supplement, but our current technology isn’t quite at the level of Star Trek yet.  Here’s a question asked recently on Reddit/foodscience . It follows a common theme for questions asked by entrepreneurs who are investigating food and supplement business opportunities.

Supplement testing

 

Question: How do I test supplements to make sure the ingredients are authentic and organic?

The Reddit poster explained that he had stumbled upon a mix of plant extracts that helped his acne and wants to make and sell a pill with those ingredients.  He writes:  “I sourced some plant extract manufacturers in china but I do want to test the plant extracts to check if they are actually what they are and if they are truly organic. Can someone please point me in the right direction as to how to do that?“.  A food manufacturing expert suggested that he seek a contract manufacturer to make the pills for him, which he said sounded like a good idea.  Then he asked “I’d feel a lot better if there was maybe a machine I could buy to check the composition of what was in there“.

Answer: I think you want a Star Trek Tricorder

I wish it was possible to buy a magic machine that will tell you what is in a product.  On the other hand I am a food/supplement fraud expert so if there was such a thing I wouldn’t have a job.

Organic testing is ‘simple’. Sort of.  To test for ‘organic’ status in a finished capsule supplement you can check that pesticide residues are absent.  There is no technology that allows you to put a pill into a machine and ask it to look for ‘anything’, so you need to ask the machine to look for specific pesticides.  The USDA perform this type of testing every year on fruit and vegetables.  Each sample is tested separately for around 200 different pesticides.  The USDA use a network of independent labs so it should be easy to find a lab that can test your finished product for pesticide.  More on the pesticide testing program here:  https://www.ams.usda.gov/datasets/pdp

Authenticity testing is not simple.

Herb-like ingredients can be tested for authenticity by an expert who looks at them under the microscope.  This only works if they are not ground up too small.

Liquid extracts and soluble powders can be tested using chromatographic methods, such as HPLC and GC.  In these methods the machine creates a chemical ‘fingerprint’ for the material and then compares that to the fingerprint of an authentic sample.  There are two things that make it difficult: firstly you need to find a lab that knows what an authentic sample fingerprint looks like for the material you want to test (they call this ‘having a database’); secondly, these methods are best suited to single ingredients.  Once you mix a whole bunch of ingredients together, if you test the mixture all the chemical fingerprints get mixed up and the machine can’t tell you which peak (which part of the ‘fingerprint’) comes from which ingredient.  There are ways around this but the methods are expensive as the databases are custom-made for each finished product that is to be tested.

Unfortunately it usually comes down to trust in your suppliers and a reliance on their systems and certifications.  Check all certifications to make sure they are not forged as unfortunately that is common in some countries.  Do this by contacting the certifier directly.

Reddit user: Karenconstable4

Want help with supplement authenticity?  Don’t know where to start?
Ask Karen

 

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Love and other illegal ingredients; food fraud news for November

Fish fraud decreasing?

Great news for Canadians, with a recent ‘citizen science’ survey finding very low levels of fish fraud at the retail level.  The study was organised by SeaChoice with the support of  the University of Guelph Centre for Biodiversity Genomics’ Life Scanner program.  Participants used DNA kits to sample fish from local grocery stores across the country.  In all, 501 samples from 49 retailers and representing 46 species were tested.  Just 1% were found to be fraudulently mis-labelled, while 7% were not labelled according to the proper names defined by Canadian regulations.  These numbers are lower than expected and – we hope – the start of a trend towards better traceability and less fraud in the seafood industry.

Gorgeous, but toxic ‘silver’ sweets

Intricately decorated festival sweets in India have been a well-known food fraud risk for many years; unfortunately they are frequently found to have been coloured with cheap and toxic textile dyes rather than approved food additives.  On the eve of the Diwali festival this year, Indian authorities tested sweets and found they contained non-food colours.  In addition, the beautiful silver gilding on some sweets was in fact made from dangerous aluminium, rather than from silver, which is inert and safe to ingest.

Hot dogs in peril

Hot dog sellers in Belgium are worrying about the price of mustard, after the world’s largest producer of mustard seeds, Canada, reported a very small harvest this year.  It is only half of the previous year and the lowest volumes in 11 years.  This is expected to effect supplies and prices of mustard which will increase the risk of food fraud.

Red, red wine

Chapitalization – the act of adding sugar to the wine making process to boost final alcohol content, is the subject of a recent crackdown by Spanish authorities. Chapitalization is not permitted in Spain, although it is allowed in some wine growing regions elsewhere.

 ¡Ay no: carne de caballo

Despite being one of the best known types of food fraud, we are still finding undeclared horse meat in beef, including recently in Mexico.  Horse meat is not illegal in Mexico, however it is not supposed to be present in beef meat.  A recent study found it at rates of around 10% of ‘beef’ products purchased from public markets, street stalls, butchers shops and taco stands.  Worse still, more than half of the meat samples that contained horse DNA also contained clenbuterol, an illegal growth enhancer.

US FDA: not loving love

The US FDA has ventured into philosophical territory by sending a pubic warning letter to the owners of a food manufacturer in Massachusetts for mis-branding their granola by declaring that it contains love.  According to the FDA, “Love is not a common or usual name of an ingredient, and is considered to be intervening material because it is not part of the common or usual name of the ingredient.” Oh FDA, you heart-breakers!

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Latest news in food fraud; tasty tapirs, ‘unripe’ honey and toxic eggs

Honey production increased by a phenomenal 88% in China between 2000 and 2014, despite an increase in the number of beehives by 21% during the same period.  This is said to be due to the harvesting of ‘unripe’ honey: the honey is removed from hives while still very watery, then it is artificially dried.   China is the world’s biggest honey producer and provides a significant proportion of Europe’s honey.

Meanwhile, a number of European countries have increased their honey exports at about the same rate as they have increased their imports from China, while there have been no increases in local production. It is alleged that the honey is being fraudulently re-labelled as European-grown honey when it originated in China. Read more about unripe honey and the European honey market here.

Contaminated eggs are being recalled and dumped by their millions in Europe and beyond

 

The biggest news in Europe in recent weeks has been the growing scandal around the discovery of a toxic pesticide in eggs.  The pesticide fipronil is commonly used to control lice and ticks on animals, however it is not allowed to be used in food production chains, including within poultry barns.  Eggs in more than 40 countries across Europe and beyond have been found to contain traces of the pesticide.  Millions of eggs have been recalled and dumped.  It is alleged that the source of the contamination can be traced back to a poultry barn cleaning company that used undeclared pesticide when treating barns in The Netherlands.  Two men from the company are being held on suspicion of endangering public health.  Read more about the egg scandal here.

Organic and eco-labelled foods are at very high risk of food fraud and as more cases of fraud in these sectors are uncovered there is a risk to consumer trust in sustainable foods according to Ecovia Intelligence.

Trust in sustainable foods is under threat from food fraud.

 

There has been depressing news from Canada this month, with undeclared meat species found in a wide selection of meat products.  Twenty percent of sampled products from the government-commissioned survey contained meat that wasn’t on the label, in quantities that could not be attributed to carry-over from product changeovers.  Seven of twenty seven beef sausages contained pork, one of thirty-eight pork sausages contained horse and one third of tested ‘turkey’ sausages contained nothing but chicken.

The citizens of Venezuela have been warned to be wary of meat from dubious sources, after zoo animals were stolen from Zulia Metropolitan Zoological Park in the city of Maracaibo. Ten species, including buffalo and tapirs, have gone missing from the zoo in recent weeks as the population suffers from serious food shortages.

Consumer trust in food producers and processed food is alarming low in the United Kingdom, reports NFU Mutual.  Almost three quarters of those surveyed believe food fraud is a widespread problem in the UK.

Want to learn more about food fraud?  Try our free training course.

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Food Fraud; the faces behind the crimes

In our previous look at the motivations behind food fraud we discovered that it takes many forms.  From spices that contain illegal colourants, such as lead chromate in turmeric, to ‘organic’ grains that are shipped with forged documents, the types of frauds that are perpetrated with food are many and varied.

Consumers have been victims of food fraud for as long as trade itself; medieval bread was adulterated with chalk, ancient Roman wine was sweetened with lead, Americans were unwittingly fed illegal horsemeat in the 1800s and more recently, baby formula and pet food have had their apparent protein content illegally enhanced with the addition of melamine. It is easy to understand why a miller in the middle ages might have diluted his flour with chalk or an ancient winemaker might have added honey or water to his wine; the ‘enhancements’ were done to increase profits or to otherwise help their businesses, for example by being able to meet demand when materials were in short supply.

The motivation for financial gain experienced by the millers and wine-sellers of ancient times remains today and is the defining characteristic of the crimes that we now refer to as food fraud.  Michigan State University’s Food Fraud Initiative recently defined it as follows: “Food fraud is deception, using food, for economic gain” (2016).  Other crimes that involve tampering with food, say for the purposes of extortion or to cause harm to consumers, are specifically excluded from this definition.  Adulteration of food with the intention of causing harm is now widely called an issue of ‘food defense’.

It has been said that there are large networks of organised criminals working together to manufacture and supply fraudulent foods.  While that is certainly the case for some types of food fraud, that is by no means the only type of food fraud perpetrator.  There are many different people involved with food fraud and each has his or her own motivations.

Ms Natalie Crayton owns an artisan sea salt business in Scotland.  Artisan salt typically sells in retail stores for three to five times the price of ‘ordinary’ table salt.  In May of 2017, Ms Crayton’s business, Hebridean Sea Salt, was accused by local authorities of deceiving consumers by claiming that the salt was hand-produced from the waters of the Hebrides.  Investigations commenced after authorities were tipped off by a former employee.  Investors alleged that more than 80% of the product did not originate in the Hebrides but was imported from elsewhere.  Ms Crayton claimed that the foreign salt crystals were used to ‘seed’ the Hebridean water to create the product, a practice which is legitimate, but usually achieved with very much lower percentages of added seed crystal.

Local, natural sea salt, from the waters of the Scottish Hebrides…. perhaps

What is to be gained by swapping out some of the locally made salt with imported salt?  Of course that depends on the cost of production of the local salt versus the cost of the imported salt.  Alibaba is currently listing wholesale food grade sea salt at US$45 and $1000 per tonne, roughly equivalent to £0.03 to £0.77 per kg.  If an artisan producer who makes local salt at a cost of £3 per kg with a gross margin of two percent replaces just thirty percent of local salt with imported salt their gross profit could increase from around two pence per kilogram to almost seventy pence per kilogram, an increase of more than three thousand percent.  Under that scenario there are significant financial gains to be made from substituting components.  On the other hand, there is also plenty to lose.

Since the investigation into the Hebridean Sea Salt company began, it has ceased operation and its products are no longer available in the market.  The brand has been severely damaged and may never recover.  Ms Clayton may be able to defend her actions in court, or may be able to prove that allegations about the concentration of imported salt in the finished products are false.  But, whether or not the claims are upheld, her business faces financial ruin.

Like Ms Clayton, the vice president of Creation Foods, Kefir Sadiklar faces an uncertain future.  He and his family-run company were charged by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency over their supply of falsely described ‘kosher’ cheddar cheese to Jewish summer camps in 2015.  It is alleged that the company forged documents to make it appear that the cheese was kosher and put the forged documents inside boxes of non-kosher cheese.  When the boxes of cheese arrived at one of the summer camps, an employee noticed that some of the boxes bore the COR symbol, a kosher certification trademark, and some did not.  The employee requested clarification from Creation Foods, wanting to be sure that the cheese was fit to use at the camp.  According to information provided to investigators by the Kashruth Council of Canada, owner of the trademark, Sadiklar provided two certificates.  The first was for the wrong food while the second, supplied a few hours later appeared to be correct.  However, the employee must have remained suspicious, because he sent the second certificate to Kashruth Council, who noticed that it appeared to be a forgery: a single digit in the product code on the certificate had been altered to match the product code on the box of cheese.  The council contacted the police who passed the case to the food inspection agency, which is responsible for enforcing food label laws in Canada.  The resulting prosecution is the first of its type in Canada.

Creation Foods is a manufacturer of bakery products, and also acts as a distributor for products made by other businesses, including the cheese it supplied to the summer camps.  Creation Foods was certified by the Kashruth Council in 2011 and permitted to use the council’s COR symbol on some of its food products.  However, it appears to have a history of using the symbol on non-kosher products and was told to ‘cease and desist’ by the council in 2012 and again in 2013.  In 2013 the council issued an alert to businesses that had purchased cakes made by Creation Foods, claiming that the cakes were not kosher despite bearing a COR symbol on the pack and warning purchasers that Creation Food’s use of the symbol was unauthorised.

The allegations about Sadiklar and Creation Foods are damning; they imply a willingness by the company to mislead its customers on a number of occasions over a period of years.  Interestingly, the price difference between the non-kosher and kosher versions of the brand of cheese involved is said to be just two to three percent.  Does food fraud that increases profits by such a small margin generate enough extra income to justify the risks?  Perhaps.  When very large volumes of food are involved, even tiny increases in margins can make a significant difference to a company’s bottom line, but in this case large volumes are not likely to be a factor.  We do not know if Sadiklar’s motivation was to generate a little more profit from the summer camp order or whether there were other forces at play… perhaps Creation Foods was holding too much stock of non-kosher cheese that was nearing its expiry date, or perhaps they had run out of kosher cheese and risked upsetting their customer by failing to fulfil the order on time. Or perhaps the risk of facing any repercussions seemed so low that even a small monetary gain could somehow feel justified.  Sadiklar and Creation Foods denies any wrongdoing so we may never know.

On a more positive note, although the fraud that is alleged to have occurred with this incident was easy to perpetrate, it was also relatively easy to detect: the customer noticed an anomaly with the kosher symbol on the boxes, requested clarification from the supplier and then, when that did not appear quite right, attempted to verify the authenticity of the certification directly with the issuing authority.  That is an excellent way to verify the authenticity of certified materials; by contacting the certifier, especially if the certification body is well-respected or are themselves accredited.

A similar case of forged documents resulted in five years jail for the men involved.  Mahmudur Rohman and Kamal Rahman were convicted by a British court for conspiracy to commit fraud after Leicestershire food safety inspectors discovered that ‘lamb’ meat they supplied was actually turkey.  The tests were conducted as part of a local testing protocol that was implemented after the European horse meat scandal of 2013.

Investigators from the trading standards office revealed that not only was the ‘lamb’ made from an entirely different animal, but the halal certificates it had been supplied with were forged.  The company is estimated to have made profits of £300K – £400K during the period in which the frauds were occurring.

Meat seems like an ‘easy target’ for food fraud; it is not easy for customers and consumers to tell the difference between meat species, especially after it has been cooked in dishes like curries.  Energy drinks on the other hand are not often featured in news items about food fraud.  Meet Walid Jamil who, along with ten others, is being sued by an American energy drink company, Living Essentials, owner of the 5-hour Energy beverage brand.  Living Essentials claims Jamil and his associates manufactured and sold counterfeit copies of 5-hour Energy.  Jamil has a history of food fraud, having been implicated in an earlier scam in which counterfeit Pillsbury products as well as the sweeteners Equal, Splenda and Truvia were manufactured in a facility in Michigan.  No criminal or civil charges were placed against Jamil or his colleagues after that bust, so it’s little wonder that he was willing to get involved with the energy drinks scheme.

It was a big operation: the energy drink counterfeiters were manufacturing replica bottles bearing high quality labels and shrink sleeves in a warehouse in California that operated 24 hours per day and made about 1.5 million bottles a month, according to Geoffrey Potter, the lead counsel for Living Essentials. The drinks were placed into legitimate distribution channels in the guise of diverted product or returns.  Sales of the genuine drink were affected and a sales rep for Living Essentials became suspicious about the source of product in a certain retail outlet.  He sent a sample to the company’s headquarters for analysis which sparked a recall and investigation.  Potter reports that when investigators found the fraudsters there was so much money changing hands that “they had to use shopping bags to pass it out.”

How did the perpetrators make so much money?  The significantly lower operating costs incurred by a clandestine operation compared to legitimate beverage manufacturing might surprise consumers.  Clandestine manufacturing operations cut corners in every area: cleaning and sanitation, pest control services, facility maintenance, food safety systems, record-keeping, audit fees, labour costs – including through the use of illegal workers – unsafe and unhygienic equipment, substandard ingredients, non-food-grade packaging, untreated water, illegal waste disposal, substandard transport and storage conditions, failure to pay business registration fees, trademark registrations and by avoiding advertising costs.  The result is an unsafe product, unsafe work environments and loss of government revenue as well as damage to the brand owners.

Compared to Living Essentials, the fraudsters who produced fake 5-hour Energy could make product and get it to the market much more cheaply.  Worse still, although it is often said that consumers can spot ‘fake’ foods because their prices are too good to be true, counterfeiters can and do sell their products at the same price points as their legitimate counterparts.  In doing so they stand to make significant profits.  However, as we have seen, the perpetrators also have a lot to lose.  Civil penalties of $20 million were delivered in the 5-hour Energy case.  The price of food fraud can include loss of businesses and livelihood, high profile prosecutions, unwanted media attention, court appearances, jail time as well as million dollar penalties and fines.  New cases are uncovered every day by sharp-eyed customers, food inspectors and by insiders who want to do the right thing.  For those involved with food fraud, it’s only a matter of time before their crimes catch up with them.

Update: Creation Foods Company was fined CAD25,000, having pleaded guilty to the charges.

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Trends and developments in food fraud 2017

Our principal consultant, Karen Constable, spoke at the World of Food Safety Conference in Bangkok in June 2017 about trends and developments in food fraud.  Here are some of the highlights of her presentation.

Recent incidences of food fraud

 

Emerging trends in fraudulent activities

Recently, we have been seeing more sophisticated operations being discovered.   As an example, a large operation that was making counterfeit versions of popular brands of sauces and condiments was discovered in China in January of 2017.  The operation was being conducted in a residential area, with processes spread across 50 buildings.   The operation was said to have been active for over ten years and was producing goods worth around $14.5 million per year.

Halal fraud appears to be on the rise, with developing countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia at high risk.  Halal meat is often indistinguishable from its non-halal counterpart which means that everyday consumers are not able to verify food sellers’ claims about halal status.  Falsely claiming halal for a food item is an easy fraud to perpetrate, especially during the retail sale of un-packaged food in restaurants and takeaway stores.  Halal fraud can be as sophisticated as forgery of certification documents accompanying bulk shipments of food or as simple as dishonest signage in a takeaway store.  There have been a number of incidences of halal fraud in the news lately and these are almost certainly the tip of the iceberg.  Indonesia and Malaysia are some of the world’s biggest markets for halal food.  Both countries have variable and sometimes chaotic food supply chains accompanied by uneven regulatory enforcement.  Halal forgery also happens in the developed world, with a recent prosecution in the United Kingdom in which the fraudster is alleged to have netted a quarter of a million pounds.  With this kind of money up for grabs, you can expect halal fraud to continue.

Counterfeiting of middle range foods, rather than luxury foods is another emerging trend.  Most well-known examples of food counterfeiting in past years have been linked to premium brands and luxury goods such as expensive wines, whiskys, truffles, saffron and caviar.  However there are increasing reports of mid-range goods being ‘faked’, with condiments, sauces, chocolate bars and beverage mixes all having been fraudulently counterfeited in recent times.

Are these new types of food crime?  It’s unlikely.  However our awareness and our detection activities are increasing.  It also appears that there are more whistle-blowing activities; it is possible that more people are willing to report on suspicious activities, as was the case with the aforementioned Chinese condiment operation, or perhaps authorities are more likely to act upon reports, as was the case with the recently uncovered Brazilian meat scandal.

New responses to food fraud

Prosecutions, fines and other enforcement activities are increasing in some countries.  India, in particular, is investing heavily in new laboratories and extra resources in the fight against food fraud.  The Indian press writes about food fraud on an almost daily basis and consumer awareness is at an all time high.  India is also considering enforcing a life-long prison sentence for perpetrators of food adulteration.  Fines of more than $3 billion have been proposed for one of the businesses at the centre of the Brazil meat scandal.  That’s quite a fine!

Europe has also discussed increased sanctions for food fraud, with the hope of harmonising the sanctions across the European Union.

Operation Opson, the annual food fraud operation of Interpol and Europol, which this year netted EUR 230 million worth of seized foods, will be extending its reach beyond Europe in coming years.

Anti-counterfeiting technology continues to be developed, expanded and improved at a fast rate.  The big news in the previous 12 months in this area is the implementation of block-chain technology into the management of supply chain traceability.  Walmart are using block-chain technology for pork and baby formula in China, while Blackmores Australia is using it to protect their brand in Asia.

Updates to food safety standards

Food fraud prevention and mitigation measures are being introduced into all major food safety management systems.  The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), a group of food companies whose mission is to harmonize, strengthen, and improve food safety management systems around the globe, sets guidance for food safety standards.  Well known GFSI standards for food manufacturing include BRC, FSSC 22000 and SQF.  Starting in 2016, all GFSI food safety standards have been progressively updated to include requirements for food companies to perform a food fraud vulnerability assessment and create control plans for food fraud.  Issue 7 of the BRC standard and version 4 of FSSC 22000 already incorporate these requirements.  SQF Edition 8 has been published and will be implemented from January 2018.

All GFSI-endorsed food safety standards and many standards that are not endorsed, such AIB and Woolworths Australia’s VQA standard will require or already require food fraud vulnerability assessments and food fraud mitigation plans to be implemented by food manufacturers.

GFSI standards have been updated to address hazards from food fraud

 

Regulatory changes

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in the USA includes specific requirements which are aimed at preventing public health hazars from malicious tampering as well as fraudulent adulteration.  Hazards to food safety from intentionally adulterated food must be included in the preventive controls hazard analyses under FSMA.  The rules associated with the FSMA are being progressively introduced in the USA.  They will also apply to food businesses that export to America.

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