The July 2026 EU Agri-Food Suspicions has been published. You can read all of the reports here.
There has been a drop from the increased number of suspicions seen in June, and a much more even spread of suspicions and incidents across different criminal activities (the bubble scale on our graphs is normalised to the largest top-right bubble - unlicenced trade - so as this bubble has reduced in absolute terms the relative scale of the other bubbles has increased).
Suspicions that caught my eye this month
- the first time that I can recall seeing a confirmed detection of plant protein (pea) as an adulterant in meat mince
- the reappearance of regular old foes; Sudan dyes in palm oil and in ground spices
- undeclared preservatives, particularly sulphites in dried fruits or preservatives in "fresh" fish
As well as traceability and document fraud, and unlicensed food businesses and import, the most frequent fraud continues to be the bulking of frozen fish and seafood, either with simple excess glaze or with excess use of polyphosphates. Plus packaged food being underweight, either in net quantity or in the declared percentage of a premium ingredient (for example, pistachio nuts in baklava).
These EU AgriFood Suspicions reports are only one information source, presenting one approach to estimating fraud frequency. There are many other approaches, each looking at different data for different purposes. An overview can be found on FAN's "Incident Trends" page.
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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