Food Fraud

Oct/09

"Of all the frauds practised by mercenary dealers there is none more reprehensible, and at the same time, more prevalent than the sophistication of the various articles of food."

So wrote Fredrick Accum, a German chemist, in his work ‘A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons', published in 1820 which exposed numerous culinary sharp practices employed in the UK.

It detailed how bakers cut their flour with alum and chalk to make loaves whiter, and included plaster and sawdust in the recipe to make them heavier. Brewers added substances like strychnine to beer to make it taste bitter and save money on hops. Worst of all was the use of lead, copper or mercury salts to make brightly coloured sweets and jellies that would be attractive to children.

Click here for RQA's Quick Tips on Preventing Food Fraud

Whilst Accum was writing nearly 180 years ago, we should not kid ourselves that today's increasing regulation and tighter controls have eliminated the problem. In fact, the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) was so concerned at the incidence of food fraud in 2002 that they established a specialist task force.

This followed an FSA study into Basmati rice sold in the UK. Using DNA techniques, it found that only 54 per cent of the bags labelled as such contained pure basmati rice - defined as a particular species of grain grown in the plains around the Ganges in northern India and east Pakistan. All the other samples had been diluted with inferior varieties - some by more than 60 per cent. One FSA official calculated that the fraud swindled consumers out of over £5 million that year alone.

Food fraud is big business and whilst no one knows its true extent, such investigations and surveys suggest that criminals and crooked food producers cheat retailers and shoppers out of hundreds of millions of pounds every year.  With the UK food sector alone worth around £70 billion per year, even small percentages of fraudulent food can prove very lucrative to criminals.  A few other facts:

  • China accounts for 80% of all counterfeit items seized at EU's borders although only 16% of these are food items
  • In 2006, 1.2M food and beverage items that were not what they claimed to be were seized at EU's external borders
  • The Russian Agency for Health and Consumer Rights
  •  seized food products worth €9.6 million in 2004
  •  issued 30,000 orders to destroy non-authentic or counterfeit goods after inspecting 132,000 food companies
  • They also disclosed that 75 per cent of the mineral water sold in Russia has fake labels on its bottles.

Denby Poultry Products Ltd was a seemingly reputable company processing meats for pet foods. However, it turned out to be part of an elaborate front for a criminal gang who were collecting waste meats from abattoirs deemed to be unfit for human consumption and ‘recycling' it back into human food and selling it to food processors, caterers and even major retailers at huge profit. The perpetrators were eventually caught and prosecuted in 2003 but not before some 1,300 tonnes of condemned meat had been sold back into the food chain.

The problem is compounded further by the global nature of the food supply chain.  Industry good practice, legislation and various audit standards have seen food companies take an increasing interest in where their raw materials are coming from and who supplies them. However, cases like Denby Poultry Products and the melamine contamination in Chinese milk prove that controls can still be defeated by determined criminals.