The EC Monthly Reports of Agri-Food Fraud Suspicions reports are a useful tool for estimating fraud incidents, signposted on FAN’s Reports page. They can be found here.
FAN produces rolling 3-month graphical analysis, a little later than usual this month due to holiday. In order to show consistent trends 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), we have 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, intended only to give a high-level overview.
Our main takeaway message is that industry risk-assessment too often focusses on specific ingredients as "high risk". In actual fact, it is the TYPE of fraud that is consistent; falsification of traceability or health documents/certification, illegal import, bulking out more expensive ingredients with cheaper ones. The affected ingredients or products vary. This suggests that risk assessment should focus more on motivation and opportunity in the supply chain, and less on "counting RASFFs".
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
- The Food Industry Intelligence Network (Fiin) free SME Hub. This excellent resource collates anonymised UK industry test results for the benefit of Small and Medium Enterprises in the food sector (registration and approval required to obtain login).
- 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.
