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5 Food Fraud Trends to Look Out For in 2023

Our Principal Karen Constable has been following food fraud news since 2015.  Every week she personally reads, watches and listens to hundreds of articles, posts and journals about food fraud.

Here’s what she is predicting for food fraud for 2023:

  1. Organic fraud in USA – (a little) less likely
  2. Waste disposal fraud
  3. Document fraud as a new area of concern
  4. Sustainability claims ‘fraud’ – more likely
  5. Authenticity testing – improving

1) Organic fraud

Awareness of organic fraud has been increasing rapidly everywhere in the world. In the USA, that increased awareness has been accompanied by growing recognition of problems with the National Organic Program (NOP). These problems are related to enforcement and coverage.  The NOP includes standards that define what can and cannot be labelled as ‘organic’, and it requires that products meet certain requirements in order to carry the USDA Organic seal.

There were a number of multi-year, very high volume frauds in the organic grain sector in the USA that have been discovered and prosecuted in recent years, including one perpetrated with corn grown in the mid-West and fraud in imported ‘organic’ soybeans. With some of those large operations exposed, the amount of fraudulent ‘organic’ bulk commodities should be reduced in the USA. The prosecutions may act as a deterrent to other would-be perpetrators.

The NOP rules have been strengthened so that they will apply to imported commodities and importing companies like brokers and traders.  They also require that the organic status of bulk food in non-retail containers is correctly identified with respect to its organic status. There have also been updates related to the qualifications of organic inspectors and the rigour of on-site inspections.

Although the new rules are at least one year away, the market for organic commodities has been ‘put on notice’ and this should reduce the amount of organic food fraud in the USA.

organic produce pesticide authentic fruit vegetable

2) Waste disposal fraud

Waste disposal fraud has (probably) been happening for decades, but we are becoming more aware of the risks.  Waste fraud takes many forms but a typical scenario is one in which a food company contracts a waste company to securely destroy and dispose of goods that do not meet quality or safety parameters so that they cannot be diverted back to consumers.  However when fraud occurs, the waste company sells the sub-standard food, or otherwise allows it to return to consumers.

In one recent example, damaged jars of food were diverted back to the legitimate marketplace by the company that had promised to destroy them (and issued a disposal certificate to the brand owner).

This type of fraud is not new, but awareness of potential fraud in the waste supply chain has increased.  At the same time, food companies’ supplier approvals programs are more likely to include waste contractors than previously.  This means that there could be less waste disposal fraud than before (hopefully!)

 

3) Food safety document fraud (a bigger worry than we first thought?)

Document fraud is nothing new. It is a key element in many types of food fraud.  Falsified laboratory reports, fake organic certificates and even fake disposal declarations are all examples of document fraud.

In the context of food fraud, document fraud is most likely to support a profitable fraud, such as passing off conventional soybeans as ‘organic’ so they can be sold for a much higher price.

In ‘normal’ food frauds, then, the document fraud is just part of the package, and the documents do not directly make the food vulnerable.

There is one class of food, however, that has a special – and perhaps easily missed – food fraud vulnerability.  These are foods that are not usually thought of as ‘high risk’ for food fraud, but that rely on authentic/true documents for critical food safety criteria.

An example is ready-to-eat cold, cooked chicken purchased by a sandwich manufacturer.  A faked expiry date or falsified microbiological result on the certificate of analysis would place the sandwich company and its consumers at risk of serious consequences.  Because the faked, forged or falsified documents in that scenario provide subtle economic advantages to the supplier, this type of scenario could be considered food fraud.

Such vulnerabilities could easily slip through the net of traditional food fraud assessments. For suppliers whose economic circumstances are getting tougher, the motivation to perpetrate ‘minor’ document frauds like falsifying microbiological tests could be getting stronger, potentially increasing the likelihood of such frauds occurring.

 

4) Problematic sustainability claims

Claims about the sustainability credentials of foods are on the rise, as consumers increasingly value such claims.  Unfortunately, many green claims made about consumer goods have the potential to be misleading.

A United Kingdom government survey found 40 percent of such claims were problematic because of either non-accredited, own-brand logos; non-disclosure of environmentally harmful practices or ingredients; vague language; or lack of evidence to support claims such as ‘eco’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘natural’.

Vague claims and own-brand logos do not necessarily constitute food fraud, however food businesses need to be careful about the integrity of the data they use to support claims they intend to make about their products or operations.

Claims about carbon neutrality, carbon net-zero and greenhouse gas emissions reductions need to be evidenced using data from the whole supply chain.  This is where food companies can be vulnerable.

If a food company’s supplier provides incorrect data related to the carbon footprint of the material or service being purchased, the outcome of any emissions calculations done by the purchasing company will be incorrect.  The result?  The food company could be guilty of accidentally misrepresenting its sustainability status.

Other fraud pitfalls for food companies include fraudulent certification schemes and logos used by their suppliers, and errors in interpreting or complying with the varying green claim regulations in different markets.

Read more about the risks that come with carbon-neutral claims in Issue 61 of Karen’s newsletter The Rotten Apple and about consumers’ confusion with sustainable seafood claims in Issue 63.

 

5) Authenticity testing – more accessible, better expertise

Laboratories continue to improve their authenticity testing services to support medium-sized food businesses with food fraud detection. The level of food fraud knowledge and expertise in the food testing industry is getting better and more tests are becoming available.

The Food Authenticity Network’s (FAN) Centres of Expertise Program is making valuable contributions to the expertise and accessibility of food fraud tests.  A FAN centre of expertise is a laboratory or academic institution with expertise in one or more types of authenticity tests.

 

This article originally appeared in The Rotten Apple newsletter on 20th February 2023.

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How food fraud is uncovered; two cases of origin fraud

Origin fraud occurs when a food is misrepresented with respect to its geographical origin; it’s a type of fraud that can be categorised as ‘mislabeling’.

Examples of mislabeling include:

  • describing a fruit or vegetable as ‘organic’ when it was conventionally grown
  • cheeses and meats labeled as kosher or halal that are not
  • Spanish olive oil falsely declared as being ‘Italian’.  This is origin fraud.

Mislabeling is also called misbranding in some countries.  Because it is intended to deceive customers and consumers it is illegal under consumer protection laws and trade/contract laws just about everywhere.  Because almost every type of food fraud involves mislabeling to some extent, quoting statistics on mislabeling is difficult.  As an example, a botanical supplement labelled as 100% turmeric extract but that actually contains 15% filler is both mislabeled and diluted.  To make it even trickier, different organisations using different words to describe similar food fraud activities.  Learn more about classifying food fraud types in this great Food Safety Tech Article.  Suffice to say, mislabeling fraud is very common and, according to US Grocery Manufacturers Association, it affects around 10% of food products globally.

Coffee growers in Hawaii have launched a class action to protect their products

How do we expose origin fraud?  Typically, origin fraud is uncovered after authorities have been tipped off about suspect activity in a supply chain, either by people from within the supply chain or by competitors of the mislabeled product.   The evidence used to pursue the fraudsters often comes from either fraudulent documentation, or from testing of finished products.  This year we have seen an increase in the use of authenticity testing by representatives of ‘authentic’ brands to expose fraudulent products.  This is a trend that I expect to continue as test methods are improved, refined and can more easily be extended to assess specific product attributes.

I have been following this trend with interest and was reading, today, about alleged origin fraud in coffee in the United States. This is a case that is representative of the trend to use sophisticated test methods to authenticate finished product attributes.  Another recent example would be honey testing in Australia.  In the coffee case, growers from the Kona district of Hawaii have filed a lawsuit against retailers for allegedly selling ‘Kona’ coffee that does not contain a reasonable amount of coffee from the district. Kona coffee production is 2.7 million pounds, however more than 20 million pounds of coffee labelled ‘Kona’ is sold each year.  The plaintiffs claim to have analytical test results to support their claims.  Nineteen brands of coffee, sold by retailers including Walmart, Cosco and Amazon, have been named in the complaint.  Chemical testing technology underpins this current lawsuit, as it allows the coffee growers to show, for the first time, the actual Kona content of the coffee that is being allegedly mislabeled.  For this to be possible, the coffee growers would have had to organise for testing laboratories to create a database of chemical test results of authentic samples of Kona coffee.  Databases like this are used to model a product’s unique chemical fingerprint using sophisticated mathematical computations.  The test method can then be used to compare the ‘fingerprints’ of suspect brands against those of authentic products, such as Kona-grown coffee, and infer the amount of genuine material in each sample.  Developing databases for this type of testing is expensive and time consuming.  However, there are an increasing number of laboratories that have the machinery, skills and software to perform this work, so it is becoming more accessible to brand owners.

Specialty vinegars fetch high prices and can be vulnerable to economically motivated food fraud.

In cases that do not originate with product testing, it is activities in the supply chain that provide clues to origin fraud.  This month there have been reports of origin fraud for a specialty vinegar, Modena balsamic vinegar.  Modena balsamic is protected by a special geographical designation under European regulations.  According to these rules, Modena balsamic vinegar must be produced using grapes only from certain regions in order to be considered authentically ‘Modena’.  A massive fraud involving 15 million Euros worth of materials has been uncovered in Italy after a special operation by local authorities found that the wrong grapes were being used to produce this very expensive product.  Although operational details about this investigation are scarce, these types of actions by authorities are often initiated after authorities have received a tip off from someone connected with the supply chain.   Another example of such a tip-off includes this recent wine counterfeiting operation in which authorities became aware that a printing shop had received an order for 4,500 wine labels from a company that was not the brand owner.

More tip-offs and more testing are my predictions for 2019 and 2020.  These are going to lead to more investigations, complaints and enforcement actions against perpetrators of food fraud.  And that’s a win for everyone!

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Supplements, the last frontier?

The supplement industry received a wakeup call last year, particularly in the USA, after the New York attorney general commenced legal proceedings against 13 supplements manufacturers alleging that the supplements did not contain exactly what they should have contained.  The sampling and test methodology used to support the prosecution has been widely criticised, and the industry considers the results to be questionable at best.  Nevertheless, the issue of authenticity and adulteration has received extra attention among producers and users of supplements since then.

Some examples of recent supplement frauds have involved grape seed extract adulterated with peanut skins.  Ironically, grape seed extract has also been found to be an adulterant itself, with some cranberry products adulterated.  Within the supplements investigated by the New York attorney general, valerian was found to contain garlic and wild carrot, echinacea was found to contain rice and buttercup DNA while St Johns wort was alleged to contain DNA from a species of ornamental house plant.

What’s being done?  Well you won’t read about it in the press but there’s no question that large retailers, including those that were targeted by the New York attorney general, such as Walmart, Target, GNC and Walgreens, have reviewed and tightened up their purchasing contracts; supplement testing methodology has been reviewed and reputable supplement manufacturers are testing more of their ingredients more often.  And that’s great news for consumers.

 

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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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