Each year, we publish aggregated trends from some of the main commercial tools that log global food fraud incidents. Our 2025 report is now available.
The number of regulatory food fraud reports published in 2025 remained low relative to food safety incident reports.
We concentrated on reports published by regulatory agencies. These only give one angle, but they are recorded consistently and in a form that enables data aggregation and trend analysis.
These provide some evidence of an emerging upward trend of reported fraud incidents between 2023 and 2025. Further data is required to see if this is a consistent and continuing trend. As a comparator, for the same period there is a clear upward trend in the number of food safety incident reports.
The top three commodity groups accounting for the most food fraud reports in 2025 varies depending on the source of reports and the commercial database interrogated:
- Using regulatory reports only, ‘Processed foods’, ‘Milk & diary products’ and ‘Beverages’.
- Using regulatory, media & peer reviewed publication reports, ‘Dairy’, ‘Meat & Poultry’ and ‘Herbs & Spices’.
It should be noted that the featuring of commodity groups in this report does not necessarily mean that these are the foods associated with the most fraud, as reported food fraud incidents could either be a measure of actual food fraud incidents or a measure of regulatory activity. Thus, reporting is influenced by a range of factors including, sampling rate changes, targeted campaigns/ regulatory focus on commodity groups, inter-agency operations (e.g. Europol, Interpol etc.) and available budget.
Labelling, use of non-food substance, dilution/ substitution and artificial enhancement fraud were the top four types of food fraud reported by regulators in 2025. Of these frauds, using non-food substances in food has the potential to do the most harm as seen in the previous incidents such as, Sudan dyes in chilli powder and melamine in infant formula.
Commercial food fraud incident collation tools are not all the same; there are differences in functionality and purpose. Before choosing a tool, it is important to understand how it collects, classifies and curates its data and what insight it is intended to provide. Our analysis used Horizonscan, SafetyHud and FoodChainID. We are extremely grateful for them providing data “in-kind”. Contact details for each company are in the report.
You can read the full report here.
Summaries from previous annual reports are here.
It is the third annual report to be produced for this FAN Partner project. Platinum and Gold FAN Partners receive dashboard reports at the end of each quarter. Please contact FAN, if you are interested in becoming a partner and receiving these quarterly updates.
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