This report provides a summary of global food fraud reports in 2024 from three of the world’s leading commercial food fraud incident collation tools: FoodChain ID Food Fraud Database, HorizonScan and Safety HUD.
Food fraud reports published by global regulatory agencies during 2024 do not provide evidence of a consistent, significant trend during 2024, and in fact, are like those seen in 2023. The activity associated with official food fraud and food safety reports remained fairly consistent across the four quarters of 2024.
The top three commodities with the most food fraud reports varies depending on the source of reports and the tool used:
- Using official reports only, Beverages’, ‘Processed foods’ and ‘Milk & diary products’.
- Using official, media & peer reviewed publication reports, ‘Seafood’, ‘Honey’ and ‘Dairy’.
Although ‘milk & dairy products’ is the only common commodity in the top three foods with the greatest number of reports above, seven commodities are common in the top ten foods from both the average of official reports only and data from Food Chain ID. In fact, many of these commodities are also common in Food Chain ID’s data over a ten-year period, demonstrating that these foods are most reported as being fraudulent, year on year.
It should be noted that the featuring of commodities in this report does not necessarily mean that these are the world’s most fraudulent foods, as many of these commodities are often the subject of targeted sampling and analysis by regulators and inter-agency operations conducted by Europol, Interpol etc… Other factors can also have an influence, for example, the number of peer reviewed publications on commodity-specific authenticity issues.
The number of official food fraud reports published in 2024, by an average of forty-seven sources, is very low at only ~8% of food safety reports. There were no new sources of food fraud data reported by regulatory agencies in 2024. If analysis of official food fraud reports is to be meaningful, more regulatory agencies should publish their data in an open access format.
Botanical and animal origin fraud were the most reported type of food fraud in 2024, followed by use of non-food substance and dilution. Of these frauds, using non-food substances in food has the potential to do the most harm as seen in the Sudan dyes in chilli powder and melamine in infant formula incidents.
This report is the second annual report to be produced for this Partner project.
Platinum and Gold FAN Partners receive quarterly dashboard reports at the end of each quarter. Please contact FAN, if you are interested in receiving these reports.
Commercial food fraud incident collation tools are not all the same; there are differences in purpose, how data are classified, collected and curated. Before choosing a tool, it is important to understand what it does so that the most appropriate tool for the intended purpose is selected.