The NFCU have published their quarterly update for industry.
It covers the UK's updated Strategic Food Crime Assessment (described more fully in a FAN blog earlier this month), a specific warning about counterfeit vodka and a more general warning about meat composition and labelling, plus includes a section on best practice for goods-in checks. Specific ingredients that are suffering current price or availability volatility are highlighted; UK lamb and pork, tea, edible oils, and lemon.
Two open access, E-learning resources from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been added to the E-Seminars section of our Training section:
In order to access these free courses, you need to register for an IAEA Nucleus account first here.
In this study (open access) the authors used the fingerprint profile of fats and their metabolites to classify the cultivar (as either Tonda di Giffoni, TG, or as non-TG) and origin (either Chile CHL, Spain ESP, Italy ITA or Georgia GEO) of hazelnuts. They propose a systematic workflow (see graphical abstract, below) first examining the Triacylglycerol profiles (TAG) as a screen and then testing the Unsapnifable Fraction (UF), if needed, for further classification.
The reference database was constructed from 309 traceable hazelnut samples collected from 2019 to 2022 directly from producers. Analyses was by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry.
PLS-DA classification models were developed to discriminate hazelnuts by cultivar and origin. The authors report that external validation results demonstrated the suitability of the UF fingerprint as a hazelnut authentication tool. Both tested models showing a high efficiency (>94 %). The correct classification rate of the TAG fingerprinting method was lower (>80 %), but due to its faster analysis time, it is recommended as a complementary screening tool to UF fingerprinting.
The European Commission has published its 2023 report on the Alert and Cooperation Network, which facilitates cooperation and information exchange between Member States on official controls in the agri-food chain. The report reveals a significant increase in notifications compared to 2022 – a sign of the growth in cooperation between Member States in this area.
The Alert and Cooperation Network is composed of four sub-networks, each with an individual focus.
The Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) facilitates the rapid exchange information between food safety authorities on health risks related to food, feed or food contact materials. In 2023, there was an 8% rise in RASFF notifications, with a total of 4695 notifications. As in previous years, the most reported issue in RASFF concerned pesticide residues, followed closely by pathogenic micro-organisms. The top notifying countries continued to be Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
The Administrative Assistance and Cooperation component (AAC) allows Member States to notify violations of EU food safety legislation which do not constitute a health risk. In 2023, there was a 24% increase in AAC notifications, with 3166 notifications.
The majority of AAC notifications in 2023 were linked to non-compliant fruits and vegetables, again mainly due to pesticide residues, followed by cases of mislabelling, such as unauthorised health claims for food supplements.
The Agri-Food Fraud Network (FFN) registered a 26% rise in notifications, with 758 fraud suspicions. The illegal trade of cats and dogs remained a major issue, with 414 notifications. Other suspicions related to meat substitution, honey adulteration, and mislabelled olive oil. Additionally, 1075 AAC notifications and 1625 RASFF notifications were flagged as potential fraud, prompting deeper inspections or investigations by Member States.
In its first operational year, the Plant Health Network (PHN) generated 128 notifications, as Member States shared details about non-compliant consignments of plants, plant products, and other items (such as seeds, fruits, vegetables, wood, and flowers) and other plant health concerns.
In this study (purchase required), 14 widely commercialized GM soybean events, including GTS40-3-2, MON89788, CV127, A2704-12, A5547-127, 305423, 356043, MON87701, MON87705, MON87708, MON87769, SYHT0H2, FG72, and DAS-444Ø6-6 were utilised as targets for event-specific identification. A high-throughput detection method was established by integrating a single universal primer multiplex PCR (SUP-M-PCR) with capillary electrophoresis The authors report that this method enables the identification of 14 soybean events in a single PCR reaction, addressing the limitations of conventional multiplex PCR such as self-inhibition and amplification variations between different primers. Furthermore, it significantly enhances the sensitivity and accuracy of previous multiple detection methods, achieving a detection sensitivity of 0.05% (w/w). They conclude that this approach improves detection efficiency and holds promising potential for the identification and detection of the 14 targeted GM soybean events and their derivatives.
Photo by Meredith Petrick on Unsplash
The Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland have published their joint Food Crime Strategic Assessment (FCSA) for 2024.
The FCSA supports the protection of consumers and the reputation of the UK food and drink industry through the following strategic objectives:
● Setting out a current assessment of the threats posed to the UK food system from food crime
● Identifying opportunities to detect, tackle and prevent food crime
● Taking a collaborative approach with local authorities, regulators and law enforcement agencies
● Alerting the UK food and drink sector to the threat of food crime and how it could impact on their supply chains
Specific threats identified and discussed include:
● Misrepresentation of red meat and poultry, with regards to status, origin or durability date
● Waste diversion, including links to Animal By-Products (ABP) handling within red meat and poultry supply chains
● The servicing of consumer demand for culturally preferred products through the slaughter, unlawful processing or importation of lamb and pork
● Authenticity challenges in the supply chains of commodities posing notable or persistent fraud risks to UK consumers arising from upstream, overseas adulteration and misrepresentation
There are areas of clear change from the assessment of 2020, including a significant reduction in the entry of illicitly gathered shellfish into the UK food chain (likely driven by changes to exports after EU Exit) and the rise in the retail availability of a broad spectrum of illicit imports in the UK, referred to as ‘grey market goods’. UK responsibilities for enforcing 2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP) prohibition now sits with the police rather than food agencies, but this ongoing risk is also discussed
The servicing of consumer demand for specific, culturally preferred products, mainly relating to meat, both through illicit domestic production and through importation, remains a prominent theme, presenting in several different forms.
This review (open access) covers a range of topics relating to insect-protein safety and quality including a substantial section on authentication. It is an output of the Czech-Slovenian bilateral project: Quality, Safety and Authenticity of Insect Protein-based Food and Feed (INPROFF). It references studies to map the insect supply chain as well as analytical techniques to verify either the species or the substrate in which it has been reared. Published techniques are largely based on stable isotope ratio analysis. The review concludes that there have been relatively few authenticity studies, with a significant literature gap, and that without the necessary tools, a nascent insect farming industry is ripe for economic fraud. The authors highlight a gap in metrological traceability for insect ingredient quality and authenticity analysis. They report that the INPROFF programme is addressing this by developing a reference dataset based on genuine samples.
Photo by oktavianus mulyadi on Unsplash
This is posted on behalf of Demi Ellis - she is seeking survey respondants to complete a research project:
Calling all UK or Irish honey consumers
My name is Demi Ellis and I’m currently completing a research project as part of an MSc in International Business within Ulster University Business School, under the supervision of Dr Damian Gallagher.
As part of this, I’m conducting a survey to obtain the perspectives of consumers on organic honey, which employs an exciting, innovative technology referred to as blockchain. Specifically, it will examine factors which impact consumer WTPP for blockchain-enabled organic honey. Your responses are pivotal in enabling me to gather as much data for the analysis of this research. If you have any colleagues or contacts that you feel would also be interested in undertaking this survey, I would appreciate if you could share where appropriate.
To partake, you must meet the following criteria:
Your decision to participate is entirely voluntary and you have the ability to withdraw at any stage. If you wish to take part, the estimated completion time is about 10 minutes.
As a token of appreciation, on completion of the questionnaire, you will have the opportunity to enter a draw for one of five One-4-All e-Vouchers worth £10 each.
Please be assured that your responses will remain completely anonymous and are strictly used for research purposes. All data collected will be stored safely and securely.
To obtain further details and to participate, please click on the either of the two links displayed below:
📌 TOPIC OF STUDY: Factors affecting consumers’ Willingness-To-Pay-Premiums (WTPP) for blockchain-enabled organic honey
👉 TARGET AUDIENCE: Honey consumers in United Kingdom, Northern Ireland or Ireland
⏳ DURATION: 8 – 10 minutes
🔗 ORIGINAL LINK: https://qualtricsxmprnlqvfzp.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6s4Fr0wdByrgHgG
This review (purchase required) explores the recent advancements and applications of portable and miniature sensors, including portable/miniature near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, e-nose and colorimetric sensors based on nanozyme, for food authentication within the supply chain. After presenting the architecture and mechanism, the review discusses the application of these portable and miniature sensors in food authentication, addressing the challenges and opportunities in integrating and deploying these sensors to ensure authenticity. The review reveals the enhanced utility of portable/miniature NIR spectroscopy, e-nose, and nanozyme-based colorimetric sensors in ensuring food authenticity and enabling informed decision-making throughout the food supply chain
Photo by William Hook on Unsplash
The latest monthly EU agri-food suspicion report (July 2024) has been published. It lists 325 suspicious incidents which have been retrieved from 833 iRASFF notifications (iRASFF is the inter-country notification system for incidents which - unlike RASFF - do not have a direct safety risk. iRASFF notifications are not public).
As ever, these are not confirmed frauds but are incidents or suspicions which triggered further investigation.
The USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service has issued a new guideline on the steps food companies are expected to take to substantiate on-pack claims such as “antibiotic free” on meat and poultry products. They mandate robust documentation to support the claim and embed a strong steer towards 3rd party certification.
Animal-raising claims such as "raised without antibiotics," "grass-fed" and "free-range," and environment-related claims such as "raised using regenerative agriculture practices" and "climate-friendly," are voluntary marketing claims in the US. The documentation submitted by companies to support such claims is reviewed by FSIS and can only be included on meat and poultry labels after they are approved by the agency.
These strengthened guidelines follow a recent USDA survey which found that 20% of meat on the market labelled as “antibiotic free” contained residues of antibiotics.
Image from the guideline publication.
Two reviews have recently been published covering the use of NMR for food authentication applications.
In this review (purchase required), the key applications of NMR in food authentication, described in the literature in the 2019–2024 period, are summarized, with emphasis on food metabolomics, complementary tools such as other analytical platforms, and chemometric models.
The authors argue that food metabolomics offers enormous opportunities to obtain detailed information that can be correlated to the composition of foods. NMR analysis allows the comprehensive monitoring of the molecular profile of hundreds of metabolites in foods in a single experiment, with high repeatability and accuracy. They conclude that a validated nontargeted NMR workflow is still needed.
This article (a chapter within an e-book about NMR applications in environmental analysis) covers NMR applications for both food authenticity and contaminant testing. It gives a brief overview of NMR methodologies, examples and several applications concerning the detection of specific frauds in food and agricultural products. It covers both high resolution NMR coupled with chemometrics and low resolution and low field NMR techniques.
You can find FAN’s introductory guide to the principle and application of NMR here.
Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash
This 6-hour, 5-module, e-learning course has been produced under the EU Better Training for Safer Food (BTSF) programme. The aim of this basic-level course is to improve knowledge of staff performing official controls and their understanding of agri-food fraud, to strengthen their capacity in investigation techniques to detect and counter agri-food fraud, and to disseminate best practices, tools and procedures to detect fraud in the agri-food chain.
The specific objectives of the training are:
China does not have a national database of Economically Motivated Adulteration (EMA) events or suspicions. In this research article (open access) the authors collated 6477 reported events from central and local governmental websites (the State Administration for Market Regulation, China FDA, Chinacourt, etc.), online media (China Food Safety Net, Chinanews, Foodmate, Baidu, Sina, etc.), and the literature (CNKI), from 2000 to 2020.
Example chart from the report.
The authors have categorised trends by the type of fraud (e.g. adulteration, substitution), by the type of product affected (with meat products topping the list, but a long tail of other types of food) and also by Province. The report is illustrated by a range of pie charts and distribution graphs. It shows how trends in the specific types of fraud have changed over the past two decades although the total rate of incidence has remained high.
The authors conclude that food fraud is closely related to the local food industrial structure, consumption habits, and economic development. The EMAs will still be at a high level in the next 4 years based on the trend forecast line; therefore, production process supervision should be strengthened in high-incidence regions such as Guangdong, Shandong, Henan, Beijing, and Zhejiang, especially before the Spring Festival. Meat, vegetables and fruit are all high risk areas, as are frauds including of illegal addition, substitution or dilution and unqualified hygiene.
The International Fruit and Vegetable Juice Association (IFU) is to make IFU methods freely accessible to official laboratories in future.
Interested parties should contact the IFU Secretariat; the contact person is Aintzane Esturo (aintzane@ifu-fruitjuice.com).
The July 2024 edition of the monthly report on EU Agri-Food Fraud suspicions has been published.
This month's suspicions were retrived from 833 IRASFF notifications and the vast majority of fraud suspicions fell into the categories of implicit claim voilations, product tampering and record tampering. The five products categories with the most fraud suspicions were:
View this month's and all 2024 reports at: FFN monthly - European Commission (europa.eu)
A recent New York federal court ruling has clarified US law around on-pack “Made with …….” claims, although the legal position is still complex. Does the “made with ….” variety need to be the predominant ingredient, or can the claim merely be interpreted as “Included” amongst other, cheaper, varieties?
The court ruled that context is critical. If it is a primary ingredient then the “Made with ….” variety needs to be predominant. For example, an apple pie “Made with Bramley apples” must contain more Bramley apples than cheaper apples. But the same apple pie that claimed “Pastry made with real butter” could, legitimately, use pastry that included some butter but contained shortening as its predominant fat. This is because customers select the pie on the basis of the “apple” rather than the pastry. The amount of butter should still be made clear to the customer.
A fuller report can be found on the Global Advertising Lawyers Alliance blog.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
Job Description: Food Authenticity Specialist(P4) - (2024/0453 (020249))
Organization: NAFA-Food Safety and Control Laboratory
Primary Location: Austria-Lower Austria-Seibersdorf-IAEA Laboratories in Seibersdorf
Job Posting: 2024-08-09, 8:15:53 AM
Closing Date: 2024-08-30, 10:59:00 PM
IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING APPLICATION DEADLINE: Please note that the closing date for submission of applications is indicated in local time as per the time zone of the applicant's location.
Role
The Food Authenticity Specialist is: (1) a technical officer and research coordinator, ensuring the efficient and effective development, implementation and dissemination of research, training and scientific and technical knowledge, and assisting in the evaluation and implementation of technical cooperation projects for the IAEA and FAO; (2) a technical expert, planning and conducting technical meetings and project review missions; (3) a facilitator, working with Member States to meet their national and regional agricultural development objectives, and; (4) a liaison with relevant stakeholders on issues related to the transfer of sampling and analytical technologies to Member States.
Apply online.
The authors of this study (open access) have used gas chromatography with mass spectrometry in selected ion monitoring mode (GC/MS-SIM) to create a database that summarizes the occurrence and semi-quantitative levels of 150 sterols with 27–32 carbon atoms and 0–4 double bonds in 66 different vegetable oils and eight other matrices. They believe that this is the first time that such a comprehensive sterol database has been collated.
The paper includes a pdf Appendix file that lists all of the oil varieties and sterol markers in detail. This is an open-access resource for any analyst wanting to use sterols as varietal markers for edible oil identification.
The reference has been added to FAN’s searchable list of food authenticity databases.
Tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) is an effective anti-oxidant in edible oils. It is an approved additive for this use (preservative in oils) in the EU – E319. However, it has a poor reputation in the media and amongst some consumer groups, and many packaged food brand-owners and large restaurant chains have internal polices that prohibit its use due to “clean label” or customer safety concerns. TBHQ is therefore a prime candidate for undeclared use in the business-to-business supply of edible oils or for inclusion above the maximum levels conditional to its legal use.
This paper (purchase required) reports the development and validation of a point-of-use test strip to detect TBHQ in edible oils. The fluorescent immunochromatographic assay can be read within 15 min, and semi-quantified using a smartphone reader. The limit of quantification was calculated as 003 ug/mL.
Photo by Roberta Sorge on Unsplash
