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The UK Food Standards Agency has published a report that has developed a Cost of Food Crime (CoFC) model, which identifies and measures the economic and social cost of food crime.

Cost of Food Crime to the UK

• The total cost of food crime on the UK is estimated to be between £410 million and £1.96 billion per year.
• This is equivalent to between 0.07% and 0.33% of the UK food industry turnover each year (BEIS, 2021).
• The estimated value of fraudulent food and drink in the UK is between £296 million and £1.48 billion per year (discussed in Section 2.4 CoFC).
• The range in the estimated total cost of food crime represents the sensitivity to the volume of criminal activity, from crimes reported to estimates of total crimes (including unreported activity). Further research is required to develop the quality of data in order to narrow the range with confidence. 

The full report can be accessed here.

This FSA project develops a conceptual framework for modelling and capturing the full range of costs attributed to food crime on UK society, along with an assessment of the availability of data that would be necessary to produce this model.

An economic framework was developed for estimating the economic cost of food crime which uses:

1. Victim costs: Direct economic losses suffered by crime victims, including medical care costs and lost earnings.
2. Criminal justice system costs: Costs of anti-food crime activities, legal and adjudication services, and corrections programs including incarceration.
3. Crime career costs: Opportunity costs associated with the criminal’s choice to engage in illegal rather than legal and productive activities.
4. Intangible costs: Indirect losses suffered by crime victims, including pain and suffering, decreased quality of life, and psychological distress.
5. Market costs: Loss of profits for genuine firms.

Analysis was also conducted to assess how these costs can be calculated given available data sources. Finally, an assessment of the possibility of applying machine learning or other tools to build algorithms to calculate the costs was carried out.

The findings of this project will eventually be used in a phase 2 of the work which will look to build a model to provide preliminary estimates of the cost of food crime to UK society. 

Read full report.