It is always interesting to compare insights from different sources that track food fraud trends. As we repeatedly stress, different data sources collect and classify intelligence in different ways, are intended for different purposes, and sometimes give different (and even contradictory) warning signals about food fraud risks. The best “Horizon Scanning” protocols look at data from multiple sources and always conclude with a “so what?” question in terms of their own supply chain.
Two very useful (and free) sources that are updated every 4-8 weeks are the EU JRC Monthly Food Fraud Report (a collation of global media reports) and the EU Monthly Agri-Food Suspicion Reports (a collation of EU regulatory reports). The latest JRC report, covering February & March 2026, can be found here (although the data has yet to be added to the JRC’s online interactive Food Fraud Incidents Application) and FAN's own graphical trend analysis from the EU Suspicion Reports (February 2026 being the last published) is shown below.
Trends from our analysis include.
- The highest proportion of suspicions continue to relate to illegal trade – for example, unlicenced operators or attempting to evade import checks.
- There has been a spike in “suspicions” relating to colour enhancement of food. (see caveats below about subjectivity within our trend analysis – we exclude colour additives illegal in the EU but which appear, from the classifications, to have been declared on-pack). February 2026 suspicions included a wide range of food types where colour is viewed as a quality indicator – undeclared red dye in paprika, green dye in olives, yellow dye in cheese powder and blue dye in seaweed..
- Falsified documentation included horse passports and laboratory analysis certificates
- Frozen seafood and meat continues to be a watch-out, with net weight bulked by excessive glaze or water (or the pack simply being underweight).
- Pistachio cream adulteration is still watch-out, despite recent publicity and industry awareness.
FAN also 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. Our 2025 summary can be found here.
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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