News

This article (purchase required) uses data mining of nearly 72,000 official food inspections from China from 2018 – 2023.  It tests the hypothesis that data manipulation by local food inspection agencies has led to an overall underestimate of food fraud and food safety incidents in China.

The authors examined the distribution of non-compliant samples near the qualified standard value using exceedance multiples. To quantify the extent of data manipulation, they used an exhaustive algorithm to construct counterfactual estimates.

They report an abnormal distribution of unqualified samples near standard value, indicating potential data manipulation. Robustness tests supported this inference.

They conclude that over 11% of unqualified (failed) samples may have been adjusted to qualified status during 2018–2023, with higher manipulation rates in eastern regions than in central and western regions. The manipulation rate of unqualified samples across 25 sample provinces ranged from 8.13% to 16.30%.

It is notoriously difficult to collate fraud incidents in order to track trends and prioritise generic risks by either food commodity or country.  One of the more useful free tools for the past 10 years has been the monthly EU Joint Research Centre (JRC) collation of fraud media reports.

The JRC have just launched a searchable front-end for their database of reports.  It allows filtering by commodity, country, fraud type and other key criteria.

The JRC collation is just one of the incident databases available.  It must be remembered that different databases collect different information, in different ways, and therefore show a different angle on the true picture.  All of these sources are signposted on FAN.  Best practice is to use a combination of all sources, but the final critical question is “how vulnerable is my own supplier”.

• JRC – These are solely media reports.  They exclude cases not in the public domain, and can be biased by shocking but highly localised incidents in local food supply within poorly regulated countries.  For the past few years, FAN member Bruno Sechet has produced a useful infographic based on each month's data
• EU Agri-Food Suspicions – These are solely EU Official Reports, and only suspicions.  The root cause of each incident is unknown.  The data include pesticide residues above their MRLs.  FAN produce our own infographic on a rolling 3-month basis.
• Food Industry Intelligence Network Fiin SME Hub – These are aggregated anonymised results from the testing programmes of large (mainly UK) food companies.  The testing programmes are targeted and risk-based, not randomised, and the fraud risks within the suppliers of large BRC-certified retailers and manufacturers may be different than the companies supplying small manufacturing businesses or hospitality firms

Many testing laboratories also supply their own customers with incident collations, and there are many commercial software systems that scrape reports from the internet.  All collect and treat the data slightly differently.  FAN produce a free annual aggregate of "most adulterated foods" from three of the commercial providers, which gives very high level smoothed data.

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.