News

In this study (purchase required) bulk isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) combined with multivariate analysis was used to develop a model to identify the geographical origin of rice and authenticate different rice cultivars from Pakistan. The authors reported significant statistical differences for δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N, δ²H and δ¹⁸O isotopes amongst different basmati and non-basmati rice cultivars. δ²H and δ¹⁸O values showed a larger variation between basmati and non-basmati rice cultivars. Multivariate ANOVA showed a significant influence on rice from different regions, cultivars and their stable isotopic values.

The researchers constructed supervised classification models (LDA and PLS-DA) to assess origin. They found that the PLS-DA model achieved a the best classification accuracy at around 70 – 80%.

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

A recent thesis from the Universita di Padova involved an analysis of patterns and trends from all food fraud and adulterations reported in the RASFF database from 2005 to 2021 (n=2031). The study identified health certificates as the common manipulated aspect in food fraud, representing 40.92% of reported cases. In addition, mislabelling, adulteration, and tampering were common with meat and meat products, whereas document forgery was more frequent with nuts and seeds. Grey market activities were prevalent among dietetic foods, while counterfeiting was primarily observed in soups and sauces.  The United Kingdom emerged as a focal point with 31.8% of all food fraud notifications, followed by Italy (9.0%). China and India were identified as the predominant origins of food fraud, constituting 16.94% and 11.96% of the reported cases, respectively. The study found that nuts, nut products, and seeds accounted for the highest proportion of fraud/adulteration cases at 22.01%. Followed by fruits and vegetables (10.49%), and meat and meat products other than poultry (10.44%).

One of our Partners, Tenet Compliance & Litigation, has published issue 9 of its newsletter, the Secret Ingredient - Improving Your Fraud Prevention Planning.

The Secret Ingredient is Tenet's quarterly newsletter focused on preventing fraud and financial crime in the food and beverage sector.

This issue includes articles on:
👉 How APP fraud can infiltrate international supply chains
👉 Tenet's Global Expertise
👉 Anchoring disputes in England & Wales
👉 Risk management in the food sector.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) have published their annual technical report on emerging risks.  This report relates to EFSA’s assessment of risks reported during the 2021 calendar year.  EFSA classify 8 risks as “emerging”, most of which are bacteria, virus’s or natural toxins spreading beyond their traditional hosts. None are explicitly food authenticity related but the risk of overdose from too high Vitamin D in food supplements is highlighted, as is unforseen adverse health affects from the consumer trend towards coconut oil.

We have now added signposts to the free IAEA training and Excel add-in for chemometrics to our permanent resources lists.  You can find details on our e-seminars page.  To aid navigation, it is also listed within mitigation tools.  The add-in is invaluable to any laboratory building an authenticity classification model based upon multivariate analysis of known reference samples.

Researchers at Sydney universities are working on the application of handheld XRF scanners (traditionally used for rock or mineral analysis) to the classification of seafood origin by multi-element analysis with chemometric profiling.  The goal is a point-of-use technique that can be applied to fresh seafood and give a result within a few minutes.  Origin verification has a high public profile because the Australian government have signalled their intent to introduce mandatory country of origin labelling on fish and seafood.  The researchers published a proof of concept study in July using tiger prawns.  It is now reported that they are working with Sydney Fish Market to build a database of authentic samples to underpin a wider roll-out of the test.

The latest issue of Tenet Law’s “The Secret Ingredient” fraud mitigation newsletter includes a case study of APP fraud within the food industry supply chain.   Although a risk usually associated with consumer-to-business transactions such as property sales, Tenet warn that fraudsters are attracted to payments that are high in value, and to circumstances which easily lend themselves to email chains discussing payment, where a fake email changing account details would not necessarily look out of place. The food industry with its international supply chains and high value transactions is an enticing target. 

The red flags in this business-to-business version of the fraud are exactly the same as consumers are typically warned about in phishing e-mails including unusual e-mail addresses, poor spelling or grammar, unsolicited requests for financial details and incorrectly replicated company logos or footers.

Aquaphotomics is the classification of samples solubilised in water by the effective change of the water’s NIR spectrum.  In this proof of concept study (open access) the authors successfully applied the technique to in-house samples of tomato powder that had been adulterated with bulking agent (cornflour) and/or colouring agents to mask the adulteration (a selected range of red food dyes were tested).  They found that after principle component analysis and linear discriminant analysis (PDA-LDA) the technique could discriminate adulterated from unadulterated samples at ranges from 0.5 – 20% adulteration.  They repeated the study for three different varieties of tomatoes.  Each classification model is specific to an individual tomato variety.  The authors conclude that this could be the basis for a quick and cheap field test for adulterated tomato powder, a concern in countries where fresh tomatoes are unavailable out of season and thus powder is popular as a culinary ingredient.

There are increasing reports of organised theft of extra virgin olive oil from production mills in Andalucia. This latest media report references other cases in the past few weeks. The traceability documentation is falsified prior to intended re-sale.  Bulk commodity prices of Spanish extra virgin olive oil have doubled in the past year following poor harvests, as has Italian.  Greek prices have also increased but not to the same extent.

This comprehensive review (open access) lists applications, advantages and limitations of recent analytical strategies to authenticate whiskey (the authors use the Irish spelling but it also covers Scotch whisky).  It includes a wide range of spectroscopic, chromatographic, and novel techniques such as e-sensors that have all been used within the past 5 years.  The authors discuss future trends and perspectives.  They conclude that combining analytical and chemometric methodologies will remain fundamental in whiskey classification.

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

Honey adulteration can be very sophisticated and methods to detect it correspondingly sophisticated, expensive, and difficult to access in some countries.  Basic fraud, however, such as the addition of sugar syrups is still a possibility and can be difficult to detect even with isotope ratio techniques depending on the origin of the sugar syrup plant source.  In this study (open access), a relatively cheap honey authentication method based on HPLC-UV fingerprinting was developed.  The authors report a 100% classification rate of honey samples against a great variety of sugar syrups (agave, corn, fiber, maple, rice, sugar cane and glucose) by partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). In addition, the detection and level quantitation of adulteration using syrups as adulterants (down to 15%) was accomplished by partial least squares (PLS) regression with low prediction errors by both internal and external validation (values below 12.8% and 19.7%, respectively).

Phospholipids (PhLs) are essential components of cell membranes, characterized by a hydrophobic tail and a hydrophilic headgroup. . PhLs are found naturally in foods such as egg yolks, milk, or vegetable oils. The composition and concentration of PhLs observed in these foods vary according to the analytical methodology applied, mainly in the extraction and sample treatment process. There is limited research on using PhL profiles for food authentication.  This review (purchase required) focusses on recent analytical strategies used in characterizing PhLs in distinctive foodstuffs (eggs, milk, and vegetable oils). It discusses sample preparation, analytical separation, and detection techniques, particularly liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The authors conclude that untargeted approaches, such as PhL fingerprinting, have the potential to characterise the authenticity of food products. The review also highlights the potential of multivariate approaches to incorporate information on PhL composition to assess the authenticity of food products, an area that has been largely overlooked in previous studies.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Campden BRI have produced a free e-book on supply chain resilience; identifying, planning for and overcoming supply chain challenges.  You can download a copy by registering here.

In this paper (open access) the authors used non-targeted nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in combination with principal components analysis followed by linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA) to build a classification model that discriminated fresh from frozen-thawed fish (mackerel, trout, cod). The optimum extraction and NMR method was chosen after evaluating 6 methods to investigate both the lipid fraction and the polar fraction of the fish samples. After cross-validation embedded in a Monte Carlo resampling design, six independent classification models were obtained. Evaluation of the multivariate data analysis revealed that the most promising approaches were the ¹H NMR analysis of the lipid fraction (correct prediction of about 90.0%) and the ¹H NMR based screening of minor components of the lipid fraction with a correct prediction of about 91.9%. ¹H NMR analysis of the water extract of the fish samples showed a correct prediction of about 82.6%. The authors conclude that a general differentiation of fresh from frozen-thawed fish via non-targeted NMR is feasible, even though the underlying sample batch contained different fish species. Additional fish samples need to be analyzed with the three most promising NMR approaches to further improve the developed classification models.

Photo by Marko Markovic on Unsplash

This analysis, based on surveys or structured interviews with over 200 food and agriculture businesses, lists the most popular and effective strategies that businesses adopted to deal with the heightened threat of food fraud during Covid-19.  There was a consensus that a mixed portfolio of mitigation strategies were essential and that previous incidents had helped to improve mitigation strategies.  None of the companies reported falling victim to fraud during Covid and all considered in retrospect that geopolitical tensions were more concerning than the Covid-19 pandemic.  Although businesses did not regret the additional resources they invested in mitigation they did not consider that Covid-19 had been a main trigger for food fraud.

A number of companies had experience of being victims of fraud in the past and some examples are given.  Consensus mitigation strategies are grouped as information is power, supply chain relationship, understanding product characteristics vulnerabilities and testing capability, and people centred approaches.  There are some simple steps recommended for Small and Medium Enterprises.

This analysis was published in June.  Thank you to a respondent of our recent FAN members’ survey for bringing it to our attention.  Members are always welcome to highlight interesting items on the FAN website discussion boards, which we can then pick up in our monthly highlights bulletin.

The Government Chemist and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have published a sampling protocol for the collection of honey reference samples.

This protocol, the first of its kind in the world, defines a practical and pragmatic process for obtaining reference samples at different points in the honey supply chain, and specifies what associated records, documents and other considerations are necessary for a sample to be deemed acceptable for inclusion in a honey authenticity database.

The protocol is also available through the Defra website and has been added to the 'Guides' tab of the 'Tools_Guides_Reports' part of our 'Food Fraud Prevention' section of our website.

The report from the 12^th internationally-co-ordinated police investigation into food crime (Opson) has been published.  This cycle of the operation focussed on Europe and involved only Europol rather than Interpol.  The report highlights a significant increase in findings of fraudulent recycling of spoiled or expired food to reduce production costs (although this was a foreseen risk, and so deliberately targeted when the operation was planned).   The misuse of protected food names was also the focus of the operational activities. In the United Kingdom, authorities performed checks on protected food name products in food service establishments, such as restaurants, and in individual retailers. The checks identified cases of non-compliance with products, such as feta, Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano cheeses, and meats such as Prosciutto di Parma and products of UK origin such as Welsh beef, Cornish pasties and watercress. The checks identified mislabelling, the temporary unavailability of a specified ingredient in restaurants, but also a lack of understanding of the regulations governing the use of protected food names.

This literature study, led by the University of Lincoln, was commissioned by the FSA’s National Food Crime Unit in order to inform the advice and guidance they give to food businesses, particularly SMEs, regarding food fraud mitigation.

The report covers a number of areas of recognised best practice including the concept of cumulative prevention steps (“hurdles”) in building a food defence strategy.  They can be summarised as increasing the effort (for the fraudster), increasing the risks, reducing the rewards, reducing the temptations and removing the excuses, The authors stress that food business operators can minimise fraud risk by focused supplier approval and procurement processes being embedded in their ‘business as usual’ operations. They recognise the risk that supply chain pressures and practices to deliver low-margin and lower cost food products can promote mindsets and an operating environment where deception, misrepresentation, and fraud occur.

The UK Food Standards Agency has published a report that has developed a Cost of Food Crime (CoFC) model, which identifies and measures the economic and social cost of food crime.

Cost of Food Crime to the UK

• The total cost of food crime on the UK is estimated to be between £410 million and £1.96 billion per year.
• This is equivalent to between 0.07% and 0.33% of the UK food industry turnover each year (BEIS, 2021).
• The estimated value of fraudulent food and drink in the UK is between £296 million and £1.48 billion per year (discussed in Section 2.4 CoFC).
• The range in the estimated total cost of food crime represents the sensitivity to the volume of criminal activity, from crimes reported to estimates of total crimes (including unreported activity). Further research is required to develop the quality of data in order to narrow the range with confidence. 

The full report can be accessed here.

Cinnamomum verum (true cinnamon or Ceylon cinnamon) and Cinnamomum cassia (Cinnamomum aromaticum, false cinnamon) are both common food ingredients and can be difficult to differentiate. True cinnamon has a price premium.  This paper (open access) gives a review of review of analytical methods to discriminate the two species.  The authors report that a diverse array of techniques have been documented, encompassing organoleptic, physical, chemical, and instrumental methodologies, such as spectroscopic and chromatographic methods. They conclude that electronic noses (e-noses), which detect and analyse volatile organic compound (VOC) profiles, have significant potential for a rapid, non-destructive, and cost-effective approach.  The authors also conclude that continued research and development efforts in the utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in conjunction with spectroscopic data will lead to improved methods to combat cinnamon adulteration.

Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash