Global reports of food fraud have been collated for over 40 years on the USP database under various ownership iterations (Decernis, FoodChainID). The owners have always taken the approach that media reports, official reports or literature surveys are assessed by a team of analysts before logging, to ensure that fraud is genuinely the cause. Thus the database holds relatively few entries but with relatively high confidence in the categorisation of each entry.
A summary of all entries has now been published in the open access literature. Top of the list of “most adulterated foods” is dairy products. This chimes with the recent annual summaries of “most adulterated foods” published on FAN’s website. Patterns of food fraud do not appear to have changed over the past four decades.
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