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This study (purchase required – USD$24.95) developed and validated a classification model using portable near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to detect adulterants in butter. Seven adulterants were studied in a range between 2% and 100%: palm fat, margarine, and cottonseed, canola, sunflower, corn, and soybean oils. A total of 412 samples were analyzed, including 12 adulterated samples seized in an operation of the Brazilian Federal Police.

The authors report that their model performed an almost perfect classification, with the discrimination corresponding to key variables associated mainly with C–H (fat) bonds. This interpretation was corroborated by an exploratory principal component analysis (PCA) model. Samples seized by the Brazilian police were effectively detected as non-authentic. The estimate of quantitative parameters, decision limit (CCα) and detection capability (CCβ), for qualitative methods allowed to establish semi-quantitative models.

They conclude that this approach provides a practical, non-destructive, and environmentally friendly solution for food authentication, addressing the urgent need for reliable methods in combating butter adulteration.

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An interesting editorial blog from a UK legal firm on whether use of AI in internal company processes can increase risk of prosecution under the Failure to Prevent Fraud Act.

This UK Act enshrines a legal principle that is common to other anti-fraud law around the world.  Unlike traditional corporate criminal attribution, the prosecution does not need to establish that any senior individuals within the company knew about or were party to the fraud. Liability arises solely from the fact that a fraud offence was committed (by any “associated party”) that would benefit the company.

The defence is that a company took reasonable steps to mitigate fraud risks, including by its own employees and suppliers.  This is analogous to the “due diligence” defence in food safety law.

The argument here is that you cannot “outsource” this due diligence to AI.  This is because it is foreseeable that AI results will sometimes be incorrect.  In fact, if you use AI without human verification, you are weakening the due diligence defence and foreseeably increasing the likelihood of giving misleading statements.  This applies to relying on AI for everything from supply-chain risk assessments to drafting of company financial reports.

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This study (open access) investigated turmeric adulteration with lead chromate across five eastern Indian states through a combination of sample analysis and qualitative supply chain assessments. Lead chromate is a known adulterant of ground spices including turmeric, used to enhance the colour and therefore infer a higher quality or mask dilution.   The researchers collected 503 turmeric samples from 34 cities and conducted 128 stakeholder interviews between 2021-2023. In total, 30% of turmeric samples exceeded India’s permissible lead limit of 10 µg g⁻¹.

They also performed a population-level risk assessment and modelled the cost to India’s health system and economy, assuming the adulteration rate could be extrapolated across the region.  They concluded that halting the practice of turmeric adulteration with lead chromate could increase child IQ by up to 2.3 points, resulting in future income gains of US$ 239 million to 1.6 billion annually in the Bihar region alone. If cardiovascular disease mortality reductions are included, there would be an additional benefit of approximately US$ 430 million to 2.8 billion per year.

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A recent California court ruling is a reminder that food companies must be cognitive of labelling laws in the country of sale.  In the US, this includes state-specific law.

This case related to a liquorice sweet labelled as “free from …. artificial colours and flavours”.  It included the declared ingredient malic acid.  At a US federal level (FDA) this is legal, because – although the form of DL-malic acid used was synthetic - malic acid is classified as a favour enhancer not a flavour.

Under California’s Consumer Legal Remedies Act (CLRA), however, claims of consumer fraud are judged by the “reasonable consumer standard,” i.e., whether a hypothetical reasonable consumer would likely be deceived by the defendant’s conduct.  The California court found that, in this case, the company had acted fraudulently in deceiving the consumer.

You can read the full judgement here

The National Food Crime Unit of the Food Standards Agency have published their latest industry update.  Included are:

• NFCU priorities through to March 2027:

1. Adulteration and substitution of lamb, beef and poultry products
2. Waste diversion including animal by product (ABP) handling within red meat, poultry, dairy and feed supply chains
3. Specific supply chains presenting high levels of authenticity risk to the UK
4. Maintaining a focus on illegal meat imports and continuing work on our mapped Organised Crime Groups

• Demand pressures on sacrificial meat as Qurbani 2026 approaches
• Supply pressure on pistachio nuts and raisins, increased risk of origin fraud
• Supply pressure on Atlantic cod, risk of species substitution
• NFCU self-assessment tool
• Key watchouts for beef fraud in the hospitality trade
• New Seasoning and Spice Association guidance on authenticity of herbs and spices.

You can sign up for these e-mailed industry updates, and see previous updates, here

Greece’s organic certification fraud was first revealed last year.  Problems were systemic.  Certification bodies and 3^rd party auditors were implicated, issuing site certification without the required inspection and falsifying audit and site visit records.  Two of Greece’s six certification bodies were suspended.

The fraud motivation was to claim undeserved farming subsidies.

Greece’s agriculture minister has now cancelled two key organic subsidy programmes for livestock and beekeeping, and suspended all applications, pending a full overhaul of the system.  Organic certification schemes are still in operation in Greece using the remaining four Certification Bodies.

See media report here.

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This study (USD$39.95 purchase required) reports a rapid and sensitive ultra-performance liquid chromatography-tandem triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) method to detect adulteration of high-value camellia oil and olive oil with lower-cost sesame, soybean, and peanut oils.

Four characteristic markers-sesamin and sesamolin (sesame oil), 4′,7-dimethoxyisoflavone (soybean oil), and sativanone (peanut oil) were identified and quantified with high specificity.

The authors report limits of detection of 0.025%–0.10% for sesame oil, 1.0%–5.0% for soybean oil and peanut oil. Adulteration model experiments and method comparison analysis confirmed reliable multi-component adulteration detection in complex matrices.

Analysis of 106 commercial samples revealed adulteration rates of 16.0% (camellia oil) and 25.0% (olive oil), primarily with soybean oil. The analysis of two law enforcement samples confirmed adulteration with soybean oil, consistent with the official regulatory findings.

The authors conclude that this approach overcomes limitations of traditional methods.

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Conventional magnetic solid-phase extraction materials for DNA typically require multistep synthesis to coat functional layers onto an iron oxide core, which complicates their preparation and limits practical application.

In this study (USD$39.95 purchase required) the authors developed a magnetic ionic liquid-functionalized graphene adsorbent (G-MIL) that integrates the magnetic component and the functional modifier into a single material, thereby eliminating the need for a separate magnetic core and simplifying the synthesis process. This G-MIL material enabled the development of a rapid, one-step DNA extraction method that combines vortex-assisted dispersion and magnetic separation, effectively integrating isolation, enrichment, and purification without tedious centrifugation steps.

They optimised the method and applied it to the authentication of beef products.  They report good selectivity for bovine DNA in the presence of interfering proteins and amino acids. They report that their approach was successfully applied to the authentication of beef products, reliably distinguishing pure beef from adulterated counterparts.

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In 2025 the agency US Fopd and Drug Agency tested 102 honey samples, including 54 domestic samples and 48 import samples. Test methods were primarily stable-isotope testing, so testing was focussed upon detecting syrup adulteration rather than necessarily origin fraud or floral mislabelling.  They report a violation rate of about 4% for both domestic products (2 out of 54) and imported products (2 out of 48). In the 2022-2023 assignment, the agency collected and tested 107 imported honey samples and found 3% of those samples to be violative. In 2021-2022, the agency collected and tested 144 imported honey samples and found 10% of those samples to be violative.  

More details can be found here.

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In this paper (£29.95 purchase required) the authors report the development of a point-of-use test for chicken adulteration (down to 1% w/w) in meat products.  They report that the test takes 40 minutes with a per-test cost of around US$1.

They used a swab-based sampling protocol coupled with a dedicated HPV10 nucleic acid releaser. They report that this approach enables efficient DNA release from swab samples within a brief lysis step while minimizing subsequent amplification inhibition. This simplified sampling strategy was further integrated with loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) and naked-eye colorimetric detection, resulting in a fully integrated “swab-to-result” platform.

They report that validation using commercially available meat products confirmed consistent and reliable detection performance at 1% w/w adulteration.

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Italy on April 15 gave final approval to a food and agriculture protection bill that creates new crimes, tightens penalties tied to company revenue and expands controls across the supply chain..

The legislation also strengthening administrative sanctions and coordination among inspectors.  It creates a new offense of food fraud.. The law also creates a separate offense for the trade of foods with false signs, a category designed to catch misleading labels.

The bill adds specific aggravating circumstances that warrant increased penalties. Among them is “agropiracy,” a term used for organized and systematic illegal activity in the food sector. Penalties are linked to company turnover.

The law also increases penalties for counterfeiting PGI and PDO designations. It also strengthens traceability requirements, with tighter rules on how products are identified and monitored

To improve enforcement, the law creates a coordination body for inspections.

More details are in this media report.

This thought-provoking research was presented by Kwesi Boateng, a Nottingham University student, at the “Making Pharmaceuticals” show last month in Coventry, UK.  Contact details are on the poster.  It is a reminder that not all insight into food fraud risks comes from the insular bubble of the food industry, regulators and academics.

One premise of the research is that B-2-B end customers who specify “sustainable” production of botanicals to fulfil their orders, when they have no detailed knowledge of the supply chain, are almost making fraud inevitable.  At the bottom of the supply chain are small scale producers.  Sustainable supplies of botanicals are extremely limited.  If a small producer is given an order to fulfil, with no consultation and a quick delivery date, then there is a clear motive to make up any shortfall with “unsustainable” production, lying about the carbon accounting (or – even worst – bulk out the order with an adulterant).

The solution is for the end customer to understand, appreciate, and communicate with, their whole supply chain and not to introduce stresses by giving short notification orders that are difficult to fulfil.

Ground cinnamon bark (Ceylon cinnamon or “true” cinnamon) is vulnerable to substitution with the related species cinnamon camphora (cassia cinnamon) or to bulking with different parts of the plant such as roots and leaves.  There are a number of test methods, both published and proprietary, including some based on spectroscopic classification chemometrics.

 This paper (open access), from the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, gives a robust justification for a recommended FT-Raman spectroscopic screening method. The researchers based their reference database on a much wider variety of “true” cinnamon samples on the market than other published methods.  They purchased over 100 market samples of cinnamon bark from a variety of countries and ground their own reference samples.  They also investigated the chemical explanation for all spectral features that underpinned their discriminatory models

 They compared all results with complementary techniques, including GC-MS and XRF, to ensure robustness and reliability. Both of these orthogonal techniques supported the FT-Raman classification results.  XRF is based on discriminatory features independent of FT-Raman i.e. the fact that the elemental content of cassia samples is generally lower than that of Ceylon cinnamon. The detection of certain elements (e.g., Al, Si, Ti, Cr, Fe, Zr, and Pb) was also used as an indication of substitution with organic matter and/or effect by the material used to mill the cinnamon sticks. GC-MS is based on the analysis of several volatile compounds (e.g., camphor, cinnamaldehyde, eugenol, coumarin, cinnamyl acetate) for the detection of substitution of Ceylon cinnamon with cassia as well as the substitution of bark with other parts of the cinnamon plant (leaves, flowers, roots, seeds), based on the difference in relative abundances of the selected compounds. 

 The authors conclude that FT-Raman combined with Principal Component Analysis provides a very efficient and fast approach to detect the substitution of Ceylon and cassia species by Cinnamon camphora, other parts of the plant (e.g., root), and/or inorganic matter, using only cinnamaldehyde as the main marker along p1. Complementary techniques such as GC-MS and XRF can then be used to confirm the type of substitution.

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The global market for herbs and spices is complex with diverse supply chains and products being sourced from a variety of businesses ranging from large scale producers to smallholders. Many herbs and spices grow wild and are farmed on a village or subsistence scale, and there are often many intermediaries in the supply chain from farmer, collector to middle-man before arrival at the origin processor / shipper, as shown in the Supply Chain Map in Annex II of guidance and shown here:

Protecting the authenticity of herbs and spices is of the utmost importance given that many are materials that may be of high intrinsic value. Food businesses need to ensure that they have appropriate controls and mitigation measures in place to prevent or detect product vulnerabilities. As with any raw material and its supply chain, the emphasis should always be on prevention rather than detection of issues. As each herb and spice is unique, this document concentrates on identifying and assessing general vulnerabilities.

The original guidance was developed by a Joint Industry Working Group comprised of representatives of the British Retail Consortium, Food and Drink Federation and Seasoning and Spice Association, in liaison with the Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland.

This document provides Industry Best Practice Guidance on vulnerability assessment for culinary dried herbs and spices (including blends of)  and  it has been developed to help food business operators of all sizes strengthen preventative controls, enhance supply chain understanding, and collectively safeguard product integrity.

Download the guidance here. 

The document has also been added as a new guide in the 'Tools / Guides / Reports' part of our Food Fraud Prevention section.

The Royal Society of Chemistry’s “Advances in the Chemical Analysis of Food V” conference, last week, included a number of talks and posters on various aspects of food authenticity testing.  The keynote, from Professor Chris Elliot, was on the use of data fusion to improve untargeted classification models by aggregating information from multiple analytical approaches.

One presentation, from Nathan O’Neill at the University of East Anglia (a FAN Centre of Expertise) raised new suspicions about turmeric authenticity.

Conventional wisdom (and Seasoning & Spice Association guidance) is that a significant vulnerability point for turmeric adulteration is when the roots are ground.  However, in this case, Nathan sourced intact roots from both UK and overseas online sellers.  Only reputable sellers were used but there were no prior assumptions about sample authenticity.  Chemometric feature selection and modelling (using two orthogonal untargeted analytical techniques) highlighted some of the samples whch were clear outliers.  These outlying classifications were consistent between replicate analyses and between the two orthogonal test methods.

The next planned research stage is to build reference databases for each method, then check if these outliers are mislabelled or if it reflects honest variation within turmeric taxonomy and production.

Details of the conference programme and speakers can be found here

It is always interesting to compare insights from different sources that track food fraud trends.  As we repeatedly stress, different data sources collect and classify intelligence in different ways, are intended for different purposes, and sometimes give different (and even contradictory) warning signals about food fraud risks.  The best “Horizon Scanning” protocols look at data from multiple sources and always conclude with a “so what?” question in terms of their own supply chain.

Two very useful (and free) sources that are updated every 4-8 weeks are the EU JRC Monthly Food Fraud Report (a collation of global media reports) and the EU Monthly Agri-Food Suspicion Reports (a collation of EU regulatory reports).  The latest JRC report, covering February & March 2026, can be found here (although the data has yet to be added to the JRC’s online interactive Food Fraud Incidents Application) and FAN's own graphical trend analysis from the EU Suspicion Reports (February 2026 being the last published) is shown below.

Trends from our analysis include. 

• The highest proportion of suspicions continue to relate to illegal trade – for example, unlicenced operators or attempting to evade import checks. 
• There has been a spike in “suspicions” relating to colour enhancement of food.  (see caveats below about subjectivity within our trend analysis – we exclude colour additives illegal in the EU but which appear, from the classifications, to have been declared on-pack).  February 2026 suspicions included a wide range of food types where colour is viewed as a quality indicator – undeclared red dye in paprika, green dye in olives, yellow dye in cheese powder and blue dye in seaweed..
• Falsified documentation included horse passports and laboratory analysis certificates
• Frozen seafood and meat continues to be a watch-out, with net weight bulked by excessive glaze or water (or the pack simply being underweight).
• Pistachio cream adulteration is still watch-out, despite recent publicity and industry awareness.

FAN also produce a free annual aggregate of "most adulterated foods" from three of the commercial providers, which gives very high level smoothed data based on official reports.  Our 2025 summary can be found here.

Our interpretation of the Agrifood suspicion reports is subjective. In order to show consistent trends we have excluded cases which appear to be unauthorised sale but with no intent to mislead consumers (e.g. unapproved food additives, novel foods which are declared on pack), 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 intended only to give a high-level overview

This review (open access) evaluates isomer-resolved lipid fingerprints as a complementary approach to established screening methods to detect edible oil adulteration.  The review focusses on two underexploited structural dimensions: (i) double-bond positional and geometric isomerism and (ii) triacylglycerol (TAG) sn-regioisomerism, which encode biosynthetic specificity and processing “memory” that is less accessible to conventional compositional markers.

The authors compare analytical strategies (e.g., epoxidation-MS/MS and Paternò–Büchi reactions, ozone-based dissociation/ozonolysis, and ion mobility–mass spectrometry) highlighting their respective strengths, limitations, need for derivatisation, and fit-for-purpose roles in food-industry contexts.

The authors describe some specific examples relating to high-value oil adulteration, differentiation of native versus refined/reprocessed products, monitoring of thermal/oxidative history, and emerging nutrition-relevant structure–function questions. They recommend improvements and standardisation relating to reporting confidence and nomenclature, quantitation and reference materials, tiered workflows (screening-to-confirmatory), and defensible decision thresholds.  They identify key gaps in inter-laboratory comparability, controlled processing studies, and food-specific data infrastructure.

This study (open access) reviewed published food fraud incidents from 2015 – 2025 that were specific to South Africa.

The authors found multiple examples of instances that are high on global generic watchlists such as fish species mislabelling or meat species substitution.   They also report more “local” issues such as counterfeiting of brands, or food adulterated with chemical dyes being sold to impoverished communities.  One startling counterfeiting example was fire hydrant water being bottled and sold as branded mineral water.

They conclude that the incident history, particularly the relatively high occurrence of counterfeiting and illicit alcohol, highlights systemic regulatory shortcomings, including inadequate enforcement capacity, insufficient laboratory infrastructure, the absence of a national food fraud surveillance database, and outdated legislative penalties that fail to deter offenders.  They recommend establishing a national reporting and monitoring system, enhancing laboratory and inspection capacity, adopting advanced authentication tools, and implementing stricter regulations

Photo by Tobias Reich on Unsplash

This review (open access) gives an overview of the role of sterols in ensuring olive oil quality and authenticity, current methodologies used for their analysis, as well as key markers for detecting fraudulent practices in olive oil.

The authors summarise the regulatory specifications for sterols in olive oil then discuss how – beyond this – sterols in different fractions can be used to classify oils.  They also list different sterol markers for adulteration with different vegetable oils.  They review analytical methods, and list published chemometric classification models based on sterol profiles.

This 1-page graphic summarises, and celebrates, some of our activities in 2025.  Download it here.

It includes links to conference and webinar recordings, to some of the key resources on the FAN website, and to partner organisations.  We hope that this accessible format is ideal for members to download and share.  This version is in English; we will publish translations into other languages soon.

FAN is a network for the benefit of our members.  Please take this opportunity let us know (secretary@foodauthenticity.global) which of our resources you find particularly useful or if there are things we could add or improve in order to make your life easier.