News

Headlines:

• Food fraud reports published by global regulatory agencies during 2023 do not provide evidence of a consistent, significant trend during 2023.
• The activity associated with official food fraud and food safety reports remained fairly consistent across the four quarters of 2023.
• The top three commodities with the most food fraud reports varies depending on the source of reports and the tool used:
• Using official reports only, ‘Fruit, vegetables & legumes’, ‘Milk & diary products’ and ‘Beverages’ are the top three.   
• Using official, media & peer reviewed publication reports, ‘Honey’, ‘Herbs & Spices’ and ‘Meat & Poultry’ are the top three.
• The number of official food fraud reports published, by an average of thirty-six sources, is very low at only ~9% of food safety reports.
• Botanical origin fraud was the most reported type of food fraud in 2023, followed by dilution or substitution, and animal origin fraud.

FAN has collaborated with the providers of three leading commercial food fraud incident collation tools (FoodChain ID Food Fraud Database, HorizonScan and Safety HUD) to produce this report, which provides a summary of global food fraud reports in 2023. This report is the first annual report to be produced for this FAN Partner project. 

We are grateful to our Partners (McCormick & Company, Dr Ehrenstorfer and LGC Axio, Tenet Compliance & Litigation, the Food Industry Intelligence Network, the Institute of Food Science & Technology, SSAFE, Tesco, and BRCGS (LGC Assure)) for funding this work.

For 2024, Gold and Platinum FAN Partners will be sent a quarterly dashboard at the end of each quarter.

Read full report.

Our Secretary, John Points, has written an article for a special edition of the Institute of Food Science and Technology's Journal of Food Science and Technology focussed on 'food safety and authenticity', in which he emphasises the pervasive impact of food fraud, spanning from brand risks to safety risks, advocating rigorous risk assessment, vigilance, and the use of tools like analytical testing to effectively detect and mitigate fraudulent activities in the food industry.

The article is open access.

The modern food industry is a rapidly evolving sector with complex supply chains that utilises a wide variety of analytical tools to support food integrity and authenticity.

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)-based approaches represent an emerging analytical technology that is growing within the food sector, providing  the potential to not only screen and test input materials, but also the production process and end products. 

Photo by Braňo on Unsplash

This questionnaire is part of a UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) funded project tasked with reviewing the application of NGS technology to food authenticity testing and supporting harmonisation and the development of standards for NGS approaches applicable to the verification of food authenticity. The questionnaire is targeted at individuals involved in the food and associated diagnostics sectors, including technology developers, suppliers and official controls.

Your participation in this questionnaire will directly help inform the direction of the project and contribute to guidance within the sector.

Please do not provide any information that could be used to identify you. Thank you for participating in our questionnaire which should only take around 15 minutes to complete. Your feedback is important.

Access questionnaire.

UK National Measurement Laboratory at LGC

We are delighted that the Food Authenticity Network (FAN) has been shortlisted for supporting business resilience in the FDF Awards 2023!

The winners will be announced at the FDF Awards ceremony in September 2023 at the Roundhouse, London. Further information on the ceremony and registration can be found here.

Wish us luck!