Here is our monthly graphic from the latest EC Reports of Agri-Food Fraud Suspicions, showing a rolling 3-month trend.
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Interpretation is full of caveats, explained below. But there is a strong consistency in trends.
- The highest proportion of suspicions relate to illegal trade – for example, unlicenced operators or attempting to evade import checks. During January 2026, many of these related to trade in milk products.
- Meat/fish content fraud (previously referred to as “QUID”) is increasing pro-rata month-on-month. Most relates to excess water glaze or water content in frozen shellfish, fish or meat. This may be aided by excess use of polyphosphates.
- Falsified or missing documentation (e.g. health certificates, analytical certificates) appears frequently
- “Classic” adulteration such as meat species substitution or olive oil grade is a constant, but accounts for a lower pro-rata proportion of reports than instinct might suggest.
- Some frauds never seem to go away. January 2026 included Sudan dyes (in palm oil) and glycerol (in wine). These would not have seemed out of place 20 years ago.
These Agri-Food suspicions are just one of the incident databases available. Different databases collect different information, in different ways, and therefore show a different angle on the true picture. All of these sources are signposted on FAN. Best practice is to use a combination of multiple sources.
- JRC – These are solely media reports. They exclude cases not in the public domain, and can be biased by shocking but highly localised incidents in local food supply within poorly regulated countries. They now incorporate a search and trending tool to produce graphs and charts
- EU Agri-Food Suspicions – These are solely EU Official Reports, and only suspicions. The root cause of each incident is unknown. The data include pesticide residues above their MRLs. unapproved supplements and novel foods, and unapproved health claims.
- Food Industry Intelligence Network Fiin SME Hub – These are aggregated anonymised results from the testing programmes of large (mainly UK) food companies. The testing programmes are targeted and risk-based, not randomised, and the fraud risks within such suppliers of large BRC-certified retailers and manufacturers may be different than the companies supplying small manufacturing businesses or hospitality firms.
Many testing laboratories also supply their own customers with incident collations, and there are many commercial software systems that scrape reports from the internet. All collect and treat the data slightly differently. FAN produce a free annual aggregate of "most adulterated foods" from three of the commercial providers, which gives very high level smoothed data based on official reports. Look out for our 2025 summary to be published over the next few days.
Our interpretation of the Agrifood suspicion reports is subjective. In order to show consistent trends we have excluded cases which appear to be unauthorised sale but with no intent to mislead consumers (e.g. unapproved food additives, novel foods which are declared on pack), we have excluded unauthorised health claims on supplements, and we have excluded residues and contaminants above legal limits. We have grouped the remaining incidents into crude categories. Our analysis is intended only to give a high-level overview
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