This analysis, based on surveys or structured interviews with over 200 food and agriculture businesses, lists the most popular and effective strategies that businesses adopted to deal with the heightened threat of food fraud during Covid-19. There was a consensus that a mixed portfolio of mitigation strategies were essential and that previous incidents had helped to improve mitigation strategies. None of the companies reported falling victim to fraud during Covid and all considered in retrospect that geopolitical tensions were more concerning than the Covid-19 pandemic. Although businesses did not regret the additional resources they invested in mitigation they did not consider that Covid-19 had been a main trigger for food fraud.
A number of companies had experience of being victims of fraud in the past and some examples are given. Consensus mitigation strategies are grouped as information is power, supply chain relationship, understanding product characteristics vulnerabilities and testing capability, and people centred approaches. There are some simple steps recommended for Small and Medium Enterprises.
This analysis was published in June. Thank you to a respondent of our recent FAN members’ survey for bringing it to our attention. Members are always welcome to highlight interesting items on the FAN website discussion boards, which we can then pick up in our monthly highlights bulletin.
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