Beating the fraudsters

In the fight against food fraud, greater intelligence sharing amongst food agencies will be key to ensuring standards are met and rule-breakers brought to justice.

“Our authenticity programme is one of the leaders in Europe in developing state-of-the-art methods to detect food fraud and misdescription in a wide range of foods”
-Ian Reynolds

Picture the scene. It is London in 1820. Bakers are mixing dough with chalk and plaster to make loaves whiter and heavier. Brewers are using strychnine to make beer taste bitter. Confectioners are using poisonous lead and mercury salts to make sweets brightly coloured and more attractive to children. It’s a great time to be an enterprising food producer with questionable scruples, but probably not such a pleasurable period for the poor consumers subjected to hazardous substances on a daily basis.

Fast-forward two centuries and things have, thankfully, changed for the better. Standards have done much to improve the quality of the food we eat, ensuring there are no nasty surprises hidden away in the ingredients cupboard; and swift prosecution of transgressions has led to increased confidence in the safety (and legitimacy) of the food chain. Organisations such as the Food Standards Agency in the UK and the European Food Safety Authority have worked tirelessly in this regard.

Nevertheless, food fraud does still exist – recent high-profile cases include vodka being diluted with industrial methylated spirits and problems with the supply of rotten poultry to certain supermarkets – and stopping such illegal practices is critical to minimising public health risks and ensuring consumers get what they are paying for.

Dr Ian Reynolds is Deputy Chair of the UK Food Standards Agency, and takes the issue of food fraud very seriously. “Our authenticity programme is one of the leaders in Europe in developing state-of-the-art methods to detect food fraud and misdescription in a wide range of foods, from DNA to biochemical markers,” he says. “We work hard with local authorities to uncover cases where the consumer has been misled, whether deliberately or unintentionally, and take swift action to stop illegal activity.”

The Food Fraud Task Force, an independent body set up to address this issue, defines food fraud as deliberately placing on the market, for financial gain, foods that are falsely described or otherwise intended to deceive the consumer. And while Reynolds believes this description actually covers a multitude of sins, he sees cases of food fraud falling into two broad groups. “The first is selling food not fit for human consumption or recycling animal byproducts back into the food chain,” he explains. “Recent UK examples include condemned, diseased poultry being bleached and diverted back into the food chain and, more recently, a case in Northern Ireland where beef and poultry of unknown origin were illegally repackaged and placed on the market for human consumption. The second type of fraud is deliberate misdescription, resulting in consumers not receiving what they expected – such as farmed fish being sold as wild or non-organic food sold as organic.”

In the past, a number of high profile food frauds have centred on the meat sector, which reflects the substantial profits that can be made. “Here in the UK, we’ve had several large-scale food frauds in recent years that have resulted in successful prosecutions,” continues Reynolds. “One prosecution resulted in the ringleader of a major poultry fraud beginning his six-year sentence last year. Another case involved tonnes of condemned poultry meat, originally intended for pet food, being diverted back into the human food chain as well as other illegal meat products being targeted at UK ethnic communities. A past misdescription case, where a restaurant sold non-organic food instead of the organic food stated on its menu, also resulted in prosecution.”

One of the major challenges of tackling such activity is that, because of its illicit nature, food fraud can only be recorded once detected – meaning it is not always easy to accurately determine the true extent of the problem. To assist with these detection efforts, the Food Standards Agency has embraced a number of key initiatives to help sniff out the fraudsters. Among the dedicated resources are the Illegal Meat Task Force, a UK/Ireland network of food investigators who assist local enforcement authorities in detecting and investigating meat frauds; and the Food Fraud Database, which uses specialist intelligence software to detect emerging patterns of fraudulent activity. Intelligence is based on enforcement officer reports of suspected or known fraud.

In addition, the agency provides additional resources to assist local enforcement authorities facing resource-intensive investigations into suspected food fraud. “Typically, we’ve funded covert surveillance, the storage and destruction of food, and computer forensics,” says Reynolds. “The Food Fraud Task Force also encourages whistle-blowers to inform the authorities to known or suspected incidents of food fraud. All food businesses are required to provide relevant documentation to food enforcement officers upon request, to ensure adequate traceability throughout the food chain, and missing or incomplete documentation is another way in which food fraud can be detected.”

The UK has certainly done much to clamp down on instances of food fraud, and Reynolds is proud of the fact that individual cases – in the UK at least – are currently few and far between. Nonetheless, he is well aware of the need for constant vigilance. More important still is the necessity to share information on a Europe-wide basis to ensure standards are constantly met and enforcement consistently applied. “Protecting product identity is vital, otherwise legitimate trade and reputations of genuine producers are damaged,” he insists. “Member states need to work closely together to deal with potential food frauds and enforcement officers must work closely with legitimate traders and enforcement bodies, such as the European Anti-Fraud Office, and use their intelligence effectively.”

In terms of challenges for the future, Reynolds sees a number of key trends being important. “First, I sincerely believe we need to share timely intelligence to deal with fraud both within the EU and imports into the EU from third countries,” he says. “We also need to be ready to deal with fraud emerging in new markets – such as misleading advertising of food on the Internet. By educating consumers, traders and enforcers we’ll reduce risks to public health. More awareness denies opportunities for fraud, but we do need the infrastructure to do this – a food fraud network could be part of this, to increase international co-operation.”

Consumer tips

The detection of food fraud is not easy, although it is sometimes possible to identify products where fake packaging and labelling have been used, particularly where the originals may have been poorly counterfeited. The public should also be conscientious when purchasing food and may be right to be suspicious if they are offered a product that appears far too cheap to be true – the price may well reflect the quality and history of the food.

Preventing fraud

“We know some products are substituted or adulterated with cheaper products,” says Reynolds. “At the Agency we take food authenticity very seriously and so we’ve developed methods to authenticate food to ensure what is on the label is in the packet.”

Using science, the FSA is able to:
• Verify the geographic origin of beef using isotopic methods
• Check if poultry sold as ‘fresh’ has been previously frozen, using enzyme-based methods
• Detect the presence of meat in vegetarian products, using chemical analyses

“In addition, we are helping food analysts invest in new lab-on-a-chip technology,” continues Reynolds. “This technology is fast, safe, cheap, and easy to use. And we train analysts on a range of DNA methods we’ve developed specifically for this platform. They can, for example, determine species of fish and exotic meats or detect adulteration of Basmati rice with cheaper varieties.”

Food fraud database

In 2006 the Food Standards Agency (FSA) established a national food fraud database. This central intelligence system uses a specialist intelligence management program that is used by many other law enforcement agencies, including the Welsh Food Fraud Co-ordination Unit. In addition to having powerful searching capabilities, it is used to detect emerging patterns of fraudulent activity. The database is an important resource for local authorities that may be seeking additional information to assist with their investigations into food fraud incidents.

Intelligence is received from a variety of sources, including consumers, industry, government departments and other enforcement bodies, but particularly from local authorities. It is important that local authorities share all intelligence they become aware of in relation to known or even suspected food fraud incidents, including historical cases, with the agency. This intelligence is then be used to populate the database along with data from all other sources.