News

The legislation seeks to provide the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Organic Program with between $15m and $20m a year from 2018 to 2023 to upgrade compliance and enforcement actions in the US and abroad. An additional $5m would also be provided to improve tracking of international organic trade and data collection systems to ensure full traceability of imported products.

The proposed legislation follows a report last month, which found the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (has oversight of the National Organic Program) was lacking in its control and oversight of imported products labelled as organic and concluded that some fraudulent and mislabelled products could be slipping through customs into the US.

Read full article here.

JRC has published its monthly summary on articles covering food fraud and adulteration. In this September issue, there are articles on frauds involving Guatemalan coffee beans, tuna treated with beet and vegetable broths high in nitrites, and PGI wines in the Venice area.

Read the full summary of articles at: September JRC Fraud Summary

Confectionery containing fair trade or organic cocoa and sugar carry one of the highest risks of adulteration and mislabelling in the food & drink industry, according to Ecovia Intelligence.

Read the full article here.

Visit our Food Fraud Mitigation page for more information about services, reports and guides.

The UK National Measurement System’s (NMS) Annual highlights report has been published. The report provides a snapshot of the achievements and the impact of the NMS, and demonstrates how measurement plays a vital role in all aspects of our lives.

Every time you get a Certificate of Analysis for an authenticity test of one of your products or, more generally, use your GPS, put petrol in your car, receive a medical diagnosis etc. you are putting your trust in measurements that are underpinned by a system that ensures they are both reliable and internationally recognised. 

The Government invests approximately £65m every year in our measurement infrastructure, and it provides important support for evidence-based policy and regulation.

• The report shows that the NMS is collaborative, with 445 active academic partnerships delivering key priorities across all sectors, of advanced manufacturing, energy and environment, life sciences and digital.

• Measurement enables trade, and the NMS provides vital support to industry. In 2016/17 the NMS offered 437 different measurement services to over 731 different customers across the UK.

• The reach of the NMS is nationwide, and has a significant pool of knowledge that is shared through products, services, reference materials, event best practice guides and online resources.

• The NMS is providing important skills capabilities for now and in the future, by running a broad range of specialist training programmes and offering a trailblazer apprenticeship standard for metrology technicians.  In 2016/17, 1,189 people have been trained across 57 training courses

• Important work has started in identifying the most pressing industry challenges in the quality, reliability and integrity of data.

UK NMS Annual highlights report. 

Download your copy now

Discover the role of the Government Chemist in combating food fraud, learn the outcomes of referee cases, and read about the research carried out in 2016 under the Government Chemist function.

Highlights:

Food safety: evaluated levels of carcinogenic toxins in seeds, nuts and spices

Food authenticity: assessed claims for the geographical origin and botanical source of honey

Allergens: detected sulphites in food containing interfering ingredients such as garlic

Quantifying protein allergens: carried out research into the quantification of proteins extracted from processed food for immunoassay and mass spectrometry analysis

Foresight and future work:  looked to the future to identify food safety and authenticity related challenges and how best to prepare for them. 

Save the date: Government Chemist conference 2018
The 2018 Government Chemist Conference will take place in London on 13-14 June. Further information about the conference will be disseminated in the autumn, watch your inbox for details.

Get in touch
If you have any questions about the work of the Government Chemit, or about food safety and/or authenticity related issues, email us at: governmentchemist@lgcgroup.com or have a look at our website: www.gov.uk/governmentchemist 

Archived FSA Projects in the Q01 Food Authenticity series have moved from Europarchive to the National Archives. This meant that all our links for Q01 research project reports and SOPs contained in these reports have had to be changed. We apologise if anyone trying to access these reports or SOPs were unable to do so, but the links are now working.

Member States and the Commission have agreed a raft of measures to reinforce action following the fipronil scandal including the possible creation of  a Food Safety Officer in each country. Fipronil an insecticide used to control cockroaches, fleas and ants, but is illegal for animals intended for the food chain.  It was found on Dutch and Belgian farms and 26 Member States and 23 other countries have been affected by its contamination in eggs and egg products. The Commission stressed that this was not a food safety problem but one of food fraud.

Read the article at: Action after fipronil incident

This academic paper presents a conceptual and analytical framework for preventing food fraud informed by a situational understanding of the nature of the activities and behaviours involved in the fraud. By integrating models of enterprise with models of in-place preventative action, we can gain a fuller theoretical account of food frauds and how we can prevent them. The paper uses various olive oil fraud investigations to develop its arguments.

Read the full paper at: In Pursuit of Food System Integrity

M&S, Aldi and Lidl have suspended buying chicken from the 2 Sisters Food Group’s West Bromwich plant following a Guardian and ITV News investigation that it had changed slaughter dates, durability dates and even the origin of chicken. M&S and the FSA are conducting their own investigations after the revelations.

Thai researchers have successfully developed and validated a triplex direct-PCR assay with capillary electrophoresis detection to identify the three common milk species: cow (Bos taurus), sheep (Ovis aries) and goat (Capra hircus). The assay amplified mitochondrial COI and cyt b genes and generated PCR products of 93, 173 and 231 bp for cow, sheep and goat, respectively. It was highly reproducible, specific to target species, sensitive, and showed 100% identification accuracy. Additionally, it was applicable to milk and dairy product samples.

Read the abstract at: Species identification in milk

German researchers have developed a rapid method of authentication using a mini-mass spectrometer, ambient ionisation,and mass spectrometric data statistical analysis, which shows proof of principle and great promise for on-site real-time food authentication. The laboratory built system was tested on 3 milk types, 5 fish species and 2 coffee bean types. Analysis time to run samples and reference data sets was a matter of seconds, and 100% classification accuracy was achieved for the differentiation of milk types and fish species, and 96.4% was achieved for coffee types in cross-validation experiments. Measurement of two milk mixtures yielded correct classification of >94%.

Read the abstract at: Mini MS authentication

Figures published by the FSA show that whereas there was an increase in food hygiene interventions by local authorities in 2016/17 because of an increase in hygiene complaints, planned food standards interventions, which include authenticity and fraud, were down 4% on previous years. The FSA will use this enforcement data, along with other intelligence, to identify and target underperforming local authorities in order to secure improvements or tackle any particular problems they may have.

Read the FSA official statistics at: FSA Enforcement Statistics 2016/17

Greek researchers have developed a method to distinguish wild rabbit, which normally has a higher commercial value, from non-wild (farmed) rabbit using an elemental metabolic approach. Using ICP-MS to measure rare earth signatures, it was possible to distinguish between wild rabbit and non-wild rabbit.

Read the abstract at: Wild rabbit authentication

This post-graduate course is the result of a partnership between the Institute for Global Food Security (IGFS) at Queen's University Belfast and multinational analytical laboratory instrument and software company Waters Corporation. It offers professionals the chance to learn remotely on a part-time basis from renowned experts to increase their knowledge of the threats to feed and food compromising food security, and also about the techniques and methods which can be used to confirm food safety and integrity. Topics include concerns around food fraud, authenticity and traceability, the links between chemical contaminants and human and animal health, the biological hazards and threats posed by animal feed and food, the various technologies used to enable rapid and early detection of food safety issues, and the current and future global food legislation needed to ensure and maintain sustainable food safety production. The course is currently accepting applications for October 2017 and February 2018 start dates.

Read the article and see a video at: On-line Masters in Food Fraud

Sea-Pac owner Alistair Thompson, 70, from Lonmay, Aberdeenshire, admitted fraud at Aberdeen Sheriff Court, and has been prosecuted and given the maximum number of unpaid community hours. He arranged for Shetland Products and Fraserburgh Freezing and Cold Storage labels to go on salmon, because they were approved for export to Russia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Read the article at: Sea-Pac Fish Fraud

Fake" olive oil is on its way to British supermarket shelves, experts have suggested, as large quantities of low quality produce are being produced in Italy. The surge of fake oil is anticipated as the production costs of olive oil have rocketed by up to 40 per cent as a result of poor 2016 harvests, the falling pound, and supermarket pricing.

Read the article at: Fake Olive Oil

Researchers at the Complutense University of Madrid  have developed an electrochemical biosensor, which is able to recognise a DNA fragment virtually unchanged in the more than 4,500 mitochondrial genomes of horses sequenced, and absent in the rest of mammalian species. This biosensor is capable of discriminating in only one hour, and with statistically significant differences between beef unadulterated and adulterated with only 0.5% (w/w) of horsemeat.

Read the article at: Biosensor for horsemeat 

The European Commission has called on the UK to guarantee the protected status of food products that have been registered with the EU’s geographical indications (GIs) after Brexit.

Read the article at: GIs post-Brexit