Food Fraud Advisors

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Eight things you need to know about GM salmon

  1. AquAdvantage Salmon is the first transgenic animal to be approved for food in the USA. The US FDA announced that the salmon is safe to eat in 2015.
  2. A transgenic animal is one that has been genetically modified by adding genes from other species. In this case, the Atlantic salmon was modified with genes from Chinook salmon and ocean pout (a perch-like fish with good tolerance to low temperatures).
  3. The FDA review and assessment process took 20 years.
  4. The FDA’s safety assessment considered risks to people who are allergic to fish. The allergenicity of AquAdvantage Salmon was found to be no different to other types of salmon.
  5. The fish are only allowed to be raised in tanks in land-locked areas to prevent them from cross-breeding with other fish.
  6. The developers of the fish are promoting their environmental benefits, including less ocean pollution and a reduced requirement for wild-caught fish which are used as feed when farming salmon. The GM fish eat less and grow to market weight faster than conventionally farmed salmon.
  7. Food from transgenic organisms, including AquAdvantage Salmon has to be labelled as such in the United States.
  8. Michele Henry, Toronto Food Writer, describes the eating experience as “Exquisite”
Source: AquaBounty.com
Source: AquaBounty.com

Updated: November 2020.

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Coming to a store near you….

Keeping abreast of food fraud and food safety news is a daily activity and one of my favourite work tasks.  This week, as I skimmed through food industry trivia and pondered the launch of chocolate cheese (seriously), the two most alarming and unusual food fraud incidents I came across were news of thirty five businesses who were caught by Chinese authorities adding opium to food and a British business that was prosecuted for selling ‘almond’ powder that contained peanut.  By the way,  you did see that correctly: opium.  And just for the record, opium is not a permitted food additive.  Peanut-contamination of anything is, of course, a very serious risk to the safety of allergic consumers and has resulted in deaths in recent years.  It’s tragic to see that this type of adulteration continues to occur.

Having digested thousands of words of information about prosecutions, investigations, trends in food fashions and the changing regulatory landscape, I began to notice some patterns and found a couple of big red flags for future risks of food fraud.

Halal

Halal certifications are increasingly needed for market access for almost every food type at both the retail and wholesale level.  A halal product 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.  I see very high risks in the South East Asian countries of Indonesia and Malaysia; these being some of the world’s biggest markets for halal food and having variable and sometimes chaotic food supply chains accompanied by uneven regulatory enforcement.  However, halal forgery can happen even in the most sophisticated markets 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.

Is this meat halal?

Probiotics

Probiotics are among the hottest food ingredients for the healthy eating market right now.  New technology is claimed to enable probiotic bacteria – good bacteria – to survive in an ever-increasing range of food types, taking them beyond traditional yoghurts and ‘Yukult’ style dairy drinks.  Probiotic foods command a premium price and, as with many of the most vulnerable food fraud targets, the probiotic components are indiscernible to consumers.  There is a real and growing risk that fraudulent claims will be made about the quantity and types of live bacteria in food products, with the possibility of both accidental and deliberate frauds.  Any food business can make a mistake with formulations and shelf life, leading to discrepancies between the quantity of live bacteria in the food and what is claimed on the pack.  Premium brand owners are less likely to risk their reputation with unsubstantiated claims and these businesses are more likely to have the in-house expertise and resources to properly verify their on-pack claims.  It’s the smaller food companies and newer brands that I worry about:  they are much more likely to find themselves inadvertently or knowingly selling ‘probiotic’ products that don’t live up to the marketing hype.

Cold Brew Coffee

Can you fake cold brew coffee?  Cold brewed coffee appears to be here to stay but it has a high price tag and would be easy to fake.  Could the average consumer taste the difference between conventional and cold-brew coffee?  I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t, especially when served icy cold or with lots of milk.  The production method for cold brewed coffee is slower than conventional brewing, which usually means more costly.  And that means food businesses could be tempted to cut a few corners.  Even hipster brands that build their messages around product authenticity can find themselves in a scandal when financial pressures increase, as was the case with an ultra-premium bean-to-bar chocolate brand recently.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few incidences of fraudulent claims about cold-brewed coffee hitting the headlines this year.

Cold brew coffee: hot food fraud risk

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Preventing food fraud: what not to do

It’s been happening for millennia; the sale of food that is not quite what it should be.  We call it food fraud, and it’s a serious problem.  Although it has been a well-known problem for many years, it wasn’t until the large-scale and well-publicised ‘horsemeat scandal’ of 2013, in which beef products were found to be adulterated with horsemeat, that the international food industry started to act in a collaborative way to tackle the issue.  Since then, the food industry has discussed and implemented a range of measures designed to minimise the occurrence of food fraud.  These measures include new regulatory requirements for food fraud prevention in the USA and changes to food safety standards in other parts of the world.

One of the industry’s tools for preventing food fraud is a special type of risk assessment, known as a vulnerability assessment, which is going to become part of all major food safety standards in the next few years.  To learn more about vulnerability assessments, click here.   The risk assessment process usually includes a consideration of whether or not a food is in the form of whole pieces that are easily recognisable.  Whole foods are generally considered to be less of a risk for fraud than powders or liquids.  For example, a whole banana in its skin is relatively harder to fraudulently adulterate than banana powder or natural banana extract.  Unsurprisingly, this component of a risk assessment is based on the assumption that a food business would recognise if the whole food does not look right.

What not to do

Beta Wholesale of Queensland, Australia managed to sell containers of whole pine nuts that were found to be peanuts. Clear containers.  According to a local newspaper, a recall was initiated after a consumer noticed that the ‘pine nuts’ smelt like peanuts.  That’s a fail, Beta Wholesale and Country Fresh Food Products.  Step one in food fraud prevention is to pay attention to the food you are purchasing.

pine nut or peanut food fraud mislabelling
The recalled nuts. Source: QLD Health

 

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Food authenticity is my passion… death from inauthentic coconut drink

Why am I passionate about authenticity in our food supply? Because when we get things wrong horrible tragedies can happen; in December 2013 an allergic child died from anaphylaxis because of undeclared dairy ingredient/s in his coconut drink.   His parents knew of his dairy allergy and checked the label to make sure that the ‘natural coconut drink’ did not contain cow’s milk before they gave it to him. Unfortunately the label was wrong.

Tragedies like this are preventable.  It has taken almost two years and the near death of another child under similar circumstances for widespread action to be taken by the local food regulatory authorities here in Australia.

The importer of the drink has pleaded guilty to charges of labelling in a way that falsely describes food and will be sentenced later this month.

Coconut beverages are being tested and recalled right now, but I’m sad that it has taken such a long time for this to become a high priority for food law enforcement.

For a full report  on this incident click here.