The EC Monthly Reports of Agri-Food Fraud Suspicions reports are a useful tool for estimating fraud incidents, signposted on FAN’s Reports page. The February 2025 report can be found here.
As with all incident collation reports, interpretation must be drawn with care. The 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
- 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.
If looking at trends over time, you must also be wary of step-changes due to new data sources. For example, Turkey's public "name-and-shame" database of foods subject to local authority sanctions went online in January 2025 and has had a big impact on the data captured by all commercial incident databases.
In FAN’s graphical analysis of the Agri-Food Fraud Suspicions, shown here, 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), excluded unauthorised health claims on supplements, and we have excluded residues and contaminants above legal limits. Our analysis is subjective but intended to give a high-level overview.
We have grouped the remaining cases into crude categories. It can be seen that the majority are either unregistered trade (e.g. illegal import, or unlicenced premises), falsified certification or traceability records, or substandard meat quality/content in processed foods (what used to be termed “QUID”). It can be useful to compare a series of consecutive months to see if there is any evidence for materialisation of frauds flagged as risks by supply-and-demand pressures (e.g. the recent increase in cocoa prices). So far, we only have two months of analysis but we will continue to publish these trends over the year..
