News

A new report has been published by the UK Food Standards Agency on a review of methods for the analysis of culinary herbs and spices for authenticity.

Herbs and spices are a commodity group that consistently appear in the top ten commodities most reported as being adulterated. Due to the large variety of products that fall within the category of herbs and spices, complex global supply chains and commercial production processes, methods for verifying their authenticity / detecting fraud are not straight forward.

The main aim of this project was to identify methods for the analysis of culinary herbs and spices, in their dehydrated or dried form, for authenticity with a focus on detecting deliberate adulteration.

Authenticity testing of herbs and spices is a complex matter, and the analytical approaches used for the authenticity testing of herbs and spices are very much dependent on stakeholder needs and the purpose of testing. All methods and technologies used for the authenticity testing of herbs and spices suffer from the same issues of the lack of reliable reference samples, and difficulty of accessing proprietary validated datasets, on which to validate the methods to demonstrate their fitness for purpose. 

Read the full report and recommendations here. The report has also been added to the Research Reports section of this website.

The UK Government Chemist team, hosted at LGC, has recently had two significant scientific papers published in Nature Portfolio Journal, npj-Science of Food, highlighting the increasing complexity of honey authentication.

The papers (Honey authenticity: the opacity of analytical reports - part 1 defining the problem; and part 2, forensic evaluative reporting as a potential solution) are based on a story that appeared in the UK media in November 2020 - Supermarket brands of honey are 'bulked out with cheap sugar syrups made from rice and corn’ – after which the Food Standards Agency asked the Government Chemist to investigate the methods that underpinned the story.

The papers address the complex composition of honey, and how an interpretive system used in forensic science could help to improve evaluation of analytical findings and assessment of their strength, which, in turn, can help to make authentication of honey more robust.

The authors propose the adoption of ‘evaluative reporting’, which would see the acceptance of a formalised ‘likelihood ratio’ (LR) thought process used in forensic science for evaluation of findings and assessment of their strength. In the absence of consensus on techniques for honey authenticity, adoption of evaluative reporting will allow objective assessment, with equity to all, and a better basis to identify and address honey fraud.

This paper develops a conceptual framework to decide when to implement analytical testing programmes for fraud, and a framework to consider the economic costs of fraud and the benefits of its early detection. Factors associated with statistical sampling for fraud detection were considered. Choice of sampling location on the overall food-chain may influence the likelihood of fraud detection.

The paper is the final Scientific Opinion (SO) paper in a series of 6 SO papers developed in the EU Project FoodIntegrity.

The full open access paper is available here. Access to the other 5 Scientific Opinion papers is in the publications section of the FoodIntegrity website.