News

Seafood is one of the foods which suffers a high prevalence of food fraud. This review examines reported seafood fraud incidents from the European Union's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed, Decernis's Food Fraud Database, HorizonScan, and LexisNexis databases between January 01, 2010 and December 31, 2020. It provides a global comparison, and assesses food fraud trends across 80 countries and 72 seafood species. It also provides an analysis of the types of fraud that exist within the seafood supply chain and the supply chain nodes that are more vulnerable to criminality.

Read the full open access paper

Ensuring the safety, quality and authenticity is the basic aim of the spice and seasoning trade. The aim of this review is to present the threats to consumers posed by the presence of spice and seasonings in the diet. Of particular interest is the issue of adulteration and mislabelling mentioned in the review.

You can read the full open access paper.

 FSAI's annual report covers enforcement, inspections, sampling, recalls, Brexit, and food fraud. On its 2019 food fraud activities, the RASFF (Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed) dealt with 3,997 events, of these just 34 were notified by Ireland. Some 21 notifications were about food which had originated in Ireland, and 13 were related to foods in distribution in the country. During 2019, authorised officers from the FSAI, other state regulatory authorities, and official agencies conducted 52 investigations where breaches of food law and food fraud were suspected. Ireland published four cases relating to alcohol, beef, and fish in the European Commission’s Administrative Assistance and Cooperation/Food Fraud Network database. Eleven EU AAC FFN notifications were processed. Returns submitted by Ireland to Europol as part of Operation Opson included seizures of food of animal origin such as meat and dairy, and alcohol.

Read the article or FSAI's 2019 Annual Report

IGFS, Queens University Belfast working with ABP have analysed 413 fraud reports in the beef supply chain between 1997 and 2017 .published in the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) and HorizonScan to determine their overall pattern.  Counterfeiting was the most common type of fraud in the beef industry; it accounted for 42.9% of all reports documented. When reports were classified by area in the supply chain in the report occurred, 36.4% of all cases were attributed to primary processing, of which 95.5% were counterfeiting cases. Counterfeiting included products manufactured/packed on unapproved premises, or without appropriate inspection or documentation, as well as products issued with fraudulent health certificates.

Read the abstract

The ability to anticipate and mitigate emerging risks has always been of extreme interest to all stakeholders in the food supply chain. This paper  in New Food (Magazine), Volume 19, Issue 5, 2016 discusses the tools developed by Fera  to identify these risks before they become incidents.

Read the paper at: Food Incidents Identification