The EU Joint Research Centre (JRC) have now published their monthly collation of fraud media reports for July 2025 and September 2025 (these collations are published retrospectively, and August’s report was published in advance of July’s). The full index of reports can be found here
These new reports have also been added to the JRC database that underpins a searchable front-end for media reports of food fraud incidents. It allows filtering by commodity, country, fraud type and other key criteria.
The JRC collation is just one of the incident databases available. 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 cases less likely to be deliberate fraud such as pesticide residues above their MRLs or unpermitted (but labelled) additives. 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 largest commercial providers, which gives very high level smoothed data.
