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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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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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Blue wine, banana pens and touch-screen plates

From the fun food facts files:

Did you know that the Dominos research center in Japan was trialling delivery by reindeer?  A statement from the company said that it was a difficult decision to abandon the trial and reindeers are very difficult to control.  Uh huh.  Also from Japan and the first of its kind: a pen that can be safely used to write messages on banana skin.  I never knew I needed one of those.

Did you know that cabin conditions affect the way we perceive taste and texture?
Strawberries: not so sweet at 30,000 feet.

 

From Britain comes research that explains why aeroplane food never tastes really good.  It isn’t just because it has to be pre-cooked and schlepped from kitchen to airport to thousands of feet in the sky and then reheated before you eat it, it is also due to the conditions inside a passenger plane which actually alter our perceptions of food.  Within the cabin the atmosphere is very dry and the air pressure is lower than usual.  This affects the way our tastebuds work.  Low humidity decreases our sensitivity to odours, which are in fact the main conveyors of flavour.  Oddly, the loud background noise also has an effect on how we perceive certain tastes, with salty and sweet tastes perceived less intensely.  Loud background noise also makes food sound crunchier, which can change the apparent texture of food.

iPads.  We love them.  But do we love them enough to eat off them?  Restaurants are serving food on the screens of ipads.  One establishment serves a dish of truffle croquettes on an iPad that shows video of dogs searching for truffles.  I wonder how they clean them afterwards?

Blue wine has label compliance experts scratching their heads in EU
Gik blue wine. Looks fabulous, but what does it taste like? Gik.

 

Blue wine.  It’s a thing.  It has a gorgeous neon hue achieved with natural additives.  But for Gik, the Basque company that makes blue wine, there are legal headaches on the horizon, as Spanish lawmakers grapple with the question of what can and cannot be called ‘wine’.  Last month, Gik was fined by Spanish regulators for breaching European wine laws, which do not allow wine makers to add colourants that are not specifically approved in the oenological regulations.  Unsurprisingly, blue colourants are not on the list. Gik is appealing the fine and has filed a petition.  In the meantime, they have re-labelled and re-formulated their blue beverage by adding 1% grape must so that the product no longer needs to meet the rules for ‘pure wine’.  It’s not available where I live, which is a shame because I would love to have a taste.

 

 

 

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Wine and cheese, a tale of authenticity

During my travels through the beautiful, giant world of the interverse this week, I came across two stories about ‘replica’ products.  Because I live and breathe food authenticity I follow stories like these with great interest.  My mission as an authenticity expert is to help people to make sense of the huge amounts of information, media-spin and noise around the integrity and authenticity of food, beverages and supplements.

As I read these two stories of ‘replica’ foods, I was struck by how utterly different they are from each other.  The first story is a tale of ‘replica’ cheese, which sounds like some kind of fake non-dairy product, perhaps masquerading as the real thing.  The question of whether a non-dairy product should be called ‘cheese’ hit the headlines in Europe earlier this year when a German court ruled that products made without animal milk cannot be called ‘cheese’, leaving vegan ‘cheese’ suppliers wondering what to call their products.  But this latest story had nothing to do with that; although the labelling of vegan cheese substitutes clearly has regulatory implications, I don’t consider this particular issue to be an authenticity problem as such; purchasers of vegan ‘cheese’ are most certainly aware that the product has been produced without animal milk.

The ‘replica’ cheese in this week’s story was parmesan, and no, not the kind containing unauthorised wood pulp by-products, which has also been in the news recently.  This time, it seems that cheese makers from the Italian provinces of  Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna and Mantua, who collectively identify their region as Parmigiano-Reggiano, have decided to pursue those from outside the area who use the product names Parmesan, Parmigiano and Reggiano for trademark breaches.  So the ‘replica’ cheese is in this story is cheese made in the style of Parmigiano and Reggiano, but not actually originating from that region.

Fake cheese authentic cheese

Is this an authenticity issue?  Perhaps.  In Europe, the cheeses in question are subject to rules of Protected Designation of Origin (PDO).  Under these rules it is illegal to call a cheese Parmesan if it did not originate in Parmigiano-Reggiano and meet the strict manufacturing criteria of the Parmigiano-Reggiano Consorzio, an Italian consortium created by government decree.  In fact, US food giant Kraft had to rename its grated cheese ‘Pamesello’ in Europe to comply with these requirements.  In other parts of the world, the terms have come to be used as a generic name for the hard Italian cheese for which the region is known.  The Parmigiano-Reggiano Consorzio have decided to pursue sellers of cheese all over the world for claimed breaches of trademark.

Are the Italian-style cheeses in the news this week ‘replica’ cheeses?  No; they are real cheeses, made with animal milk and conforming to a certain regional style.  Would I call them inauthentic?  Perhaps.  Authentic food is food that is what it claims to be.  If a cheese is marketed with clear information about its place of origin, wherever that may be, then it is reasonable for a consumer to understand that it has been made in the style of Parma, rather than being made in Parma itself.  So according to my definition, that makes it authentic, at least when sold outside of Europe.  However, if the origin of the cheese is misrepresented by the seller, or on the label, then that makes the product inauthentic.  And, in most jurisdictions, illegal as well.

Replica wines

From ‘replica’ cheeses that are not exactly fake, my next stop on the web provided a fascinating insight into the emerging niche market of ‘replica’ wine.  Two companies are reinventing wine production and it is now possible to purchase a wine-like alcoholic beverage made without using grapes or fermentation processes.  In this case, I would say the use of the term ‘replica’ is perfect.  Ava Winery claims to have modelled its flavour profile on Dom Perignon’s Champagne, using a proprietary method that combines amino acids, sugars and ethanol in precise quantities.   Another company, Replica, offers a range of ‘masterful recreations’ of award-winning wines created by scientists using laboratory analyses of  key flavour characteristics.

While traditionalists may throw up their hands in horror at the thought of making that most noble of fermented drinks in a laboratory, there is nothing inauthentic about the beverages made by these two companies.  Both websites have very clear messages around the authenticity of their products.  Ava Winery states that their company is “in no way affiliated [with] Dom Pérignon® or Moët Hennessy USA, Inc. which does not endorse our products.”  Replica says that “Originality is overrated, especially when it’s overpriced.” Both are unapologetic about their mission to recreate fabulous flavours using science.  Replica’s range even includes a gorgeously packaged beverage called ‘Knockoff’ that is said to mimic a California Chardonnay.

Authentic, science-loving and beautiful-looking, what’s not to love?  I can’t wait to try some.

 

Credit: Replicawine.com
Replicawine.com

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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.