News

Cargo theft, on a large and highly organised scale, is one of the current food fraud watchouts around the world.  The risk has been highlighted by regulatory authorities including the National Food Crime Unit in the UK.

Recent examples have been as simple as hijacked lorries, or as sophisticated as fake company details and documentation used to collect consignments from despatch centres.  There has been at least one example of corrupt insiders (employees of the victim company) falsifying or hiding records in order to despatch consignments to criminal collaborators.

In the latest example, a truck carrying 40,000 pounds of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer was stolen from a distribution centre in Montclair, California.  Thanks to FAN member, and advisory board member, Quincy Lissaur, for highlighting this story.  You can read one of the many media reports here.

General mitigation advice includes looking with a critical eye at despatch and commercial orders documentation for signs of forgeries, and double-checking the company history of any new or unexpected delivery contractors.

Photo by MOHD FADZILLAH SULAIMAN on Unsplash

In this paper (open access) the authors trained a Machine Learning model to differentiate between Top, Bottom and Spontaneous fermented bottled beers.  Data were collected using a non-invasive hand held NIR scanner pointed directly through the unopened bottle using a customised foam attachment.  The model was trained on 25 samples of major brands purchased online, rather than reference samples of verified traceability, but the training samples covered a wide range of beer types from stouts to light ales, and a wide range of bottle types and colours.

The authors report good classification based on fermentation method.  They consider that evidence of a wrong fermentation method could be one quick and easy check that could flag counterfeits.  They also correlated the NIR data with sensory panel assessments and SPME-GC-MS data and concluded that non-invasive NIR has the potential to classify beers based on their aroma profiles.

Image from the paper