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Consequences (severity) of fraud on product

The Vulnerability Assessment Helper can help you to understand out how severely a product or product group would be affected by economically motivated adulteration, substitution or dilution of the raw materials or ingredients used to make your product.  No matter what answer the Helper calculates, you, with advice from other experts within the business should carefully consider the impact/s, including those listed below, and make your own choice.  Add your own choice to the column labelled ‘User rating’.  The results table and matrix on the Results (printable) page is calculated using the ‘User rating’; if one has been entered it will override the calculated result.

Possible impacts:

Food safety risks: Any adulteration, substitution or dilution of an ingredient should be treated as a serious food safety issue as a first priority.   There can be direct food safety risks to consumers from contaminated adulterants, allergenic adulterants or unhygienic handling of the ingredient during any adulteration or substitution.  There can also be an indirect food safety risk to consumers from adulterants that cause chronic disease, or are carcinogenic or are lacking in nutrients that would be present in an unadulterated product.

Loss of consumer trust: Any problem with your product or product group can be catastrophic for your brand.

Indirect risks: Adulteration, substitution or dilution of an ingredient indicates a flaw in the traceability of your product, which means non-compliance with the requirements of food safety standards and regulations.

There are financial risks associated with any incidence of food fraud.  If your company has a Risk Officer or an Enterprise Risk Management Plan the relevant persons should be informed of the results of your vulnerability assessment and consulted about how to prioritise the prevention and mitigation planning that comes after each vulnerability assessment.

 

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Characterising Ingredients

Characterising Ingredients are

  • ingredients or categories of ingredients which are mentioned in the name of a food or are implied as being present in a food by pictures or graphics on a food label; and
  • when mentioned in the name of a food or graphically represented on a food label are used to influence the choice of a consumer by describing or establishing a special characteristic of the food or by distinguishing a food from similar foods.

Examples of products with characterising ingredients include chocolate chip ice-cream, mushroom pie.

This definition is based on The Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code – Standard 1.2.10

The Vulnerability Assessment Helper asks users to note which ingredients are characterising ingredients not because a characterising ingredient is inherently more vulnerable to economically motivated adulteration or substitution but because problems with a characterising ingredient can greatly increase the vulnerability of the product group as a whole, as well as risking non-compliance with food standards and regulations.  Within the raw materials table the answer you give at ‘characterising ingredient’ does not contribute to the vulnerability calculation for that ingredient but is used when considering the overall vulnerability of the product or product group.

 

 

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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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When the big boys get it wrong…

Coles has been caught breaching its own sustainable fish sourcing policy by selling yellow fin tuna.  Yellow fin tuna is classified as ‘near threatened’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural resources and generally considered to be a fish species that cannot be sustainably fished right now.

After being caught selling the home brand canned yellow fin tuna by journalists from Fairfax Media last week, Coles reported that those particular cans of tuna were from a certified sustainable fishery in the Maldives where the population of yellow fin is ‘doing really well’. It looks to me like Coles relied on the Marine Stewardship Council certification rather than cross-checking the species sections of their own sourcing policy.

Coles has more regulatory, purchasing and compliance resources than just about any other food business in Australia.  So if they occasionally make mistakes in their policies and procedures, what hope have smaller businesses got?

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Authenticity vs regulatory compliance vs safety; the snake wine perspective

Anyone for some snake wine? According to Brady Ng of Munchies, a good snake wine should taste like a meal in a shot glass. Snake wine is made by drowning a live snake in a vessel of strongly alcoholic rice wine, often accompanied by herbs and spices or smaller reptiles like geckos.

The video below went viral this week as western viewers shared their shock and horror at the cruelty involved in producing the beverage which is popular in Vietnam, Korea and China. Leaving aside the issues of animal cruelty, here at Food Fraud Advisors we were asking these questions:

Is the snake wine in this video authentic? Sure looks like it!  Authenticity depends solely on how the finished product is marketed, so provided that the seller does not claim it was made with cobra and special rice wine if it really contains a plain old garden python and cheap grain alcohol, it could be considered ‘authentic’.  Read more about authenticity here.

Is the snake wine in this video legal? Perhaps. Its manufacturing methods may breach laws about endangered species and animal cruelty, and I can’t make any comment on whether it complies with the local liquor excise laws and taxes, but the finished product itself probably meets basic food safety laws in most of South East Asia.

Is the snake wine in this video safe to drink?  Probably.  The alcohol in the wine denatures any venom in the snake and does a great job of controlling any microbial hazards.  And I’m told a well-aged snake wine tastes pretty good.  Just make sure the snake is truly dead before you open the bottle, or you could meet the same fate as this woman in China.

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Authentic Food versus Safe Food

Food authenticity is utterly dependent on the way a food is marketed or presented.  A piece of meat sitting on a plate is just a piece of meat until someone tells you something about it; is it organic? is it free-range? grass-fed? hormone-free?  It is only after a product has been described in some way that authenticity becomes relevant.  Authentic food is food (or drink) that is what it is claimed to be.  Simple!  Or is it?  Read more about food authenticity here.

Safe food is safe to eat and it’s as simple as that.  It doesn’t matter how the food is described or sold, whether it’s horse meat or venison or giraffe, if it’s safe to eat then it’s safe to eat.  Simple!  …. well pretty simple anyway… read more about safe food here.

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