The Food Authenticity Network works on a 3-year governance cycle of strategies and targets.  We have been working on our strategy for 2025-2027, and have published a summary here.  Please take a look.  The document summarises our achievements over the past 3-year period and lays our path for the next.

The strategy restates our commitment to being an open-access network, free to all global stakeholders, advancing and sharing best practice in food fraud prevention and detection.  We will leverage our impact by collaborating with other likeminded organisations.  We will seek to accelerate our successful membership growth (currently over 5,700 members), reducing our current bias towards UK members (currently 50%) by targeting membership growth particullarly within Europe and the "5-eyes" intelligence alliance countries.  We will continue to review the resources we offer and signpost, in order to provide maximum benefit and insight to our members, from multinational food companies and testing laboratories to local small businesses and enforcement officials.  The strategy relies upon a sustainable funding model, and includes targets to grow and diversify our valued funding partner organisations and to strengthen the resilience of our IT infrastructure.

As we approach our 10-year anniversary, our vision remains as a world where collaboration and shared best practices in food fraud detection and prevention creates a safer, more transparent, and trusted global food supply for all consumers.  It is as relevant now as it was at FAN's inception.

The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission have published their monthly collation of food fraud reports for March 2025 here Thanks again to FAN member Bruno Sechet who has turned these into an infographic.  The original infographic, along with his commentary, is on Bruno's LinkedIn feed where you can also access his other food safety infographics and services.

These collations from the JRC are based on global media reports, and so give a different picture to EU agri-food "suspicions" (as analysed in our most recent blog), which is different again to annual collations of official reports as aggregated in our annual summaries.  It is important, when conducting your own risk assessments, to appreciate what a specific data source includes and what it does not.  It is helpful to look at multiple, complementary, data sources and aggregates.

The EC Monthly Reports of Agri-Food Fraud Suspicions reports are a useful tool for estimating fraud incidents, signposted on FAN’s Reports page.  The March 2025 report was added earlier this week and can be found here.

FAN has produced this rolling 3-month graphical analysis. We have excluded cases which appear to be unauthorised sale but no intent to mislead consumers of the content/ingredients of a food pack (e.g. unapproved food additives, novel foods), 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 subjective but intended to give a high-level overview.  One consistent stand-out is unlicenced production, trade or import in high risk foods, often backed up by forged documentation.  Although the details behind the reports are not public, allegorical evidence is that these cases are not just "grey market" trade to small shops and market stalls.  Much of the suspicious trade enters mainstream markets.

As with all incident collation reports, interpretation must be drawn with care.  This EC collation is drawn from the iRASSF system – these are not confirmed as fraud, and the root cause of each issue is usually not public.  There are important differences in the data sources, and thus the interpretation that can be drawn, of these data compared to other incident collations.  For example:

• JRC Monthly Food Fraud Summaries (which underpin the infographics produced monthly by FAN member Bruno Sechet) - these are unverified media reports, rather than official reports, but hugely valuable in giving an idea of which way the fraud winds are blowing
• Official reports (as collated from commercial databases such as Fera Horizonscan or Merieux Safety Hud, which underpin FAN's annual Most Adulterated Foods aggregation) - these are fewer in number and give a much more conservative estimate of fraud incidence, and may miss some aspects which have not been officially reported
• Verified reports (where the root cause has been scrutinised and interpreted by a human analyst, for example the FoodChainID commercial database) - these are also few in number, less suitable for drawing overall trends, but give specific insight and information.

If looking at trends over time, you must also be wary of step-changes due to the introduction of new data sources.  For example, Turkey's public "name-and-shame" database of foods subject to local authority sanctions went online in January 2025 and has resulted in an apparant increase in incident reports from Turkey.

The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission have published their monthly collation of food fraud reports for February 2025 here Thanks again to FAN member Bruno Sechet who has turned these into an infographic.  The original infographic, along with his commentary, is on Bruno's LinkedIn feed.

These collations are based on global media reports, and so give a different picture to EU official "suspicions" (as analysed in our recent blog), which is different again to annual collations of official reports as aggregated in our annual summaries.  It is important, when conducting your own risk assessments, to appreciate what a specific data source includes and what it does not.  It is helpful to look at multiple, complementary, data sources.

The EC Monthly Reports of Agri-Food Fraud Suspicions reports are a useful tool for estimating fraud incidents, signposted on FAN’s Reports page.  The February 2025 report can be found here.

As with all incident collation reports, interpretation must be drawn with care.  The EC collation is drawn from the iRASSF system – these are not confirmed as fraud, and the root cause of each issue is usually not public.  There are important differences in the data sources, and thus the interpretation that can be drawn, of these data compared to other incident collations.  For example:

• JRC Monthly Food Fraud Summaries (which underpin the infographics produced monthly by FAN member Bruno Sechet) - these are unverified media reports, rather than official reports, but hugely valuable in giving an idea of which way the fraud winds are blowing
• Official reports (as collated from commercial databases such as Fera Horizonscan or Merieux Safety Hud, which underpin FAN's annual Most Adulterated Foods aggregation) - these are fewer in number and give a much more conservative estimate of fraud incidence, and may miss some aspects which have not been officially reported
• Verified reports (where the root cause has been scrutinised and interpreted by a human analyst, for example the FoodChainID commercial database) - these are also few in number, less suitable for drawing overall trends, but give specific insight and information.

If looking at trends over time, you must also be wary of step-changes due to new data sources.  For example, Turkey's public "name-and-shame" database of foods subject to local authority sanctions went online in January 2025 and has had a big impact on the data captured by all commercial incident databases.

In FAN’s graphical analysis of the Agri-Food Fraud Suspicions, shown here, we have excluded cases which appear to be unauthorised sale but no intent to mislead consumers of the content/ingredients of a food pack (e.g. unapproved food additives, novel foods), excluded unauthorised health claims on supplements, and we have excluded residues and contaminants above legal limits.  Our analysis is subjective but intended to give a high-level overview.

We have grouped the remaining cases into crude categories.  It can be seen that the majority are either unregistered trade (e.g. illegal import, or unlicenced premises), falsified certification or traceability records, or substandard meat quality/content in processed foods (what used to be termed “QUID”).  It can be useful to compare a series of consecutive months to see if there is any evidence for materialisation of frauds flagged as risks by supply-and-demand pressures (e.g. the recent increase in cocoa prices).  So far, we only have two months of analysis but we will continue to publish these trends over the year..

This review (open access) presents a comprehensive summary of the principles and recent advancements in the application of stable isotope techniques for authenticity assessment. It examines their use in detecting fraud (e.g., identifying edible alcohol, exogenous water, carbonylation, and trace compounds), vintage identification, and geographical origin determination across various alcoholic beverages, with a particular focus on wine, Chinese baijiu, and beer.   It cites over 100 publications from the past 15 years.

The authors conclude that stable isotope analysis is a powerful tool for verifying the authenticity of alcoholic beverages, offering effective solutions to combat counterfeiting, mislabeling, and adulteration. They recommend that future studies should focus on understanding the ecological, biological, and hydrometeorological factors influencing isotope signatures and develop advanced multi-isotope and chemometric approaches to improve reliability. Expanding global databases and integrating emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will further enhance the effectiveness and accessibility of stable isotope techniques, ensuring safer and higher-quality alcoholic beverages for consumers worldwide.

Photo by Ibrahim Boran on Unsplash

The results of the EC 2021-2022 honey sampling and analysis co-ordinated action, following the  From the Hives report, were concerning.  This 2023 report concluded that all 10 of the sampled honeys imported from the UK were “suspicious”. 

This finding prompted further investigation by the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Defra have now published an independent expert review into the analytical methods used in the survey.  There is a lot of technical content in the review.  It re-emphasises that no single honey authenticity test is likely to be definitive, and that a weight of evidence approach should be used with some tests being weighted higher than others.  When the total weight of evidence is not strong then phrasing such as “warrants further investigation” would be a fairer conclusion than “suspicious”.

One specific learning from the review is that laboratories must take care with the selection of authenticity markers, depending on the analytical question being asked.  The example given is oligosaccharides.  Some of these markers are known to vary between honey that has had moisture mechanically removed compared to honey that has not.  Moisture removal may be a production necessity (in humid climates where honey will not evaporate naturally) or a commercial choice to speed the harvest cycle (as is commonly used in China).  Moisture-removed honey is common within UK blends of Chinese origin honeys  but is not permitted in some EU countries.  Thus a test based on oligosaccharide markers could differentiate UK honey from EU for reasons that are already understood.  It might not provide any new insight, for example, on sugar or syrup adulteration.

Photo by Art Rachen on Unsplash

FSA-funded project: Review of current and emerging analytical methods for the testing of oil for authenticity (Project FS900520)

With funding from the UK Food Standards Agency, Fera Science Limited (Fera) in York, UK is currently undertaking a project to review the current and emerging analytical methods for testing edible oils and support the further development of analytical methods which will underpin and uphold the authenticity of edible oils in the supply chain. 

As part of the project’s evidence gathering, Fera would like to invite parties involved in sourcing, processing, and/or testing edible oils to participate in an online questionnaire. 

The fundamental mission of the FSA is food you can trust. The FSA strategy sets out FSA’s vision to ensure that the UK food system is safe, and that food is what it says it is. This involves building scientific capability in Public Analyst (PA) Official Laboratories (OLs) and working with Defra’s food authenticity programme to conduct research and development for analytical methods. Suitable analytical methods are required to ensure that food is what it says it is and to manage risk around food authenticity.

 As key stakeholders, your insight will help to inform FSA regarding issues in oil authenticity and future-proofed analytical tools to support both industry and regulators, while maintaining consumer confidence in our food. 

 Your participation will be very much appreciated and your views and insight will be invaluable to the project aims.

 A summary of key findings from the questionnaire will be included in the final report, but no sensitive information will be published.

Please complete the questionnaire here. If you have any questions, please contact info@fera.co.uk.

Your kind participation will be very much appreciated and your views and insight will be invaluable to the project aims.

Photo by Stephanie Sarlos on Unsplash