Today, amidst COVID-19 lockdown and growing pandemic, global food value chains stand disrupted across all commodities. Food safety has been a growing global concern that is only set to rise in this COVID world. It is in these times that it has become more imperative than ever, to ensure unadulterated and safe food across global food value chains.

Digitisation of such value chains towards making food safe, trackable and of desired consumer quality, needs to be accelerated and implemented at a much faster pace than ever.

SourceTrace is a globally leading name in traceability and has already implemented solutions across diverse sectors such as fruits and vegetables, organic cotton, vanilla, aquaculture, flavours and fragrances, spices, honey and more. Working across 28 countries since 2013, SourceTrace’s DATAGREEN platform helps companies track their produce from global locations across all stages while maintaining complete transparency and assurance of quality.

AgNext solves the problem of quality, bringing the best of the technology world for agribusinesses. Using state-of-art technologies in computer vision, spectroscopy and Internet-of-Things (IoT), AgNext has created the singular platform QUALIX, through which trade quality and safety parameters for multiple commodities could be assessed in a minute, enabling agribusinesses to leapfrog their procurement and operations processes, optimise costs, provide traceability, sharpen and smoothen blockchains and most importantly produce excellent products of highest quality for consumers and ensure fair-trade practices with farmers.
 
Helping businesses ensure the quality of food right from the farm-gates to the consumers, AgNext has partnered with key nodal institutions in multiple commodities and has also been working with leading corporates in each of the segments.

By combining their solutions and signing an MoU, AgNext and SourceTrace have created a technology platform, TraceNext, that can provide complete value chain traceability with an assurance of quality from the farm-gates to the consumer.

The benefits for such a platform as TraceNext, brings immense value to multiple commodity value chains, ensuring various aspects like

• Trace food origin and chain of custody
• Monitor ethical and sustainable practices used in growing food
• Complete value chain traceability – from farm to consumer
• Legal and compliance norms
• Instant quality testing on trade and safety parameters
• Instant trade decisions without any delays and dependencies
• Ensure blockchain and fair-trade practices in commodity supply chains

Read full article.

 .

Europol and INTERPOL coordinated operation OPSON 2020 which targeted trafficking of counterfeit and substandard food and beverages. The ninth operation of its kind, it ran from December 2019 to June 2020 and involved law enforcement authorities from 83* countries and was also supported by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), the European Commission, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), national food regulatory authorities and private sector partners.

Counterfeit and substandard food and beverages can be found on the shelves in shops around the world. The increasing online sale of such potentially dangerous products poses a significant threat to public health. Operation OPSON was created to combat organised crime involved in this area. This year’s operational activities have found a new disturbing trend to address: the infiltration of low-quality products into the supply chain, a development possibly linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Condiments also a highly counterfeited product

This year’s operation OPSON led to the dismantling of 19 organised crime groups involved in food fraud and the arrests of 406 suspects. More than 26 000 checks were performed. As a result, about 12 000 tonnes of illegal and potentially harmful products worth about €28 million were seized. With more than 5 000 tonnes seized, animal food was the most seized product, followed by alcoholic beverages (more than 2 000 tonnes), cereals, grains and derived products, coffee and tea and condiments. Large amounts of saffron were seized: 90kg in Spain and 7kg in Belgium with an estimated value of more than €306 000. The US authorities seized 147kg of raw apricot kernel seeds sold as a cure for cancer. 

The modern food industry is fast moving with complex supply chains that utilises a wide variety of analytical tools to support food integrity and authenticity. Devices that allow diagnostic tests to be performed at or near the point of need, often termed Point-of-contact (POC), represent a growing area within the food sector with the potential to provide real-time monitoring of input materials and the production process. POC devices can range from handheld spectroscopic devices such as Raman and FT-IR instruments to desktop portable systems such as compact mass spectrometry and NMR systems.

A questionnaire looking at POC testing in the food sector has been devised by LGC as part of a Defra funded project (FA0178: Point of Contact Testing) tasked with investigating the application of POC technology to food authenticity testing. The questionnaire is targeted at individuals involved in the food and associated diagnostics sectors, including primary production, supply and manufacturing.

The project team would greatly appreciate your participation in this questionnaire, which will directly help inform the direction of the project and contribute to guidance within the sector.

POC Questionnaire: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/J8L8N3X

We thank you in advance for your assistance and kindly request that the survey is completed by Friday 31st July 2020.

Kind regards

Food Authenticity Network Executive Management Team

Following a call for new Food Authenticity Centres of Expertise (CoE) earlier this year, three new organisations have been added:

• The Institute for Global Food Security, Queen’s University Belfast has been added as a Centre of Expertise in the ‘Academic’ category.
• GfL (Gesellschaft für Lebensmittel-Forschung) mbH has been added as a Centre of Expertise in the ‘Specific Commodity’ category.
• Aberdeen Scientific Services Laboratory has been added as a Centre of Expertise in the ‘General Proficiency’ category.

For further information on these organisations, see their Full Evidence Proformas on the Centres of Expertise pages.

Applications for new Food Authenticity Centres of Expertise can be assessed throughout the year so if you think your laboratory can fulfil the AMWG criteria for a Centre of Expertise then please complete a self-assessment evidence proforma, providing evidence of your capabilities, and send to CoE@foodauthenticity.uk. 

Over 25 stakeholders from various cannabis industry sectors in Canada, USA and the EU, participated in the recent Cannabis Authenticity and Purity Standard (CAPS) Steering Committee Session, on June 23 2020, to hear more about the need for standardized safety and quality measures throughout the medicinal, edible, beverage, topical and recreational cannabis product supply chain.  

Cannabis and hemp are natural products increasingly consumed for their perceived health benefits by those seeking alternative nutrition and medicine to deal with common ailments such as chronic pain, anxiety, infections, and compromised immunity. In many jurisdictions where these products are legally available, government regulations tend to stipulate only the basic safety requirements. In most other established industry sectors, brands, retailers, and consumers demand far more than the minimum regulatory requirements and usually impose more rigorous safety and quality brand protection measures from their suppliers.

Steering Committee participants also interacted with presenters such as Roger Muse, a Vice President at the ANSI American National Accreditation Board (ANAB), who spoke about the value of third-party accreditation, standards, and testing methods specifically designed for the cannabis industry. “We are excited to be working with Purity-IQ whose CAPS third-party certification will combine requirements for ISO/IEC 17065 accreditation process together with ISO/IEC 17025 laboratory accreditation. As a condition for doing business, the CAPS certification process will provide brands and specifiers with much needed safety and consistency assurances.”

Read full article.

Happy 5th Birthday to us!

We were set-up on 14 July 2015 by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as a direct response to the review conducted by Prof. Chris Elliott to act as a one-stop-shop for all things food authenticity testing related. Today, we have over 1,830 members from 78 countries / territories around the world and in 2019, over 12,000 users accessed the website. We've also added sources of good practice information on food fraud mitigation to our scope recognising that it's best to try to prevent #foodfraud from happening in the first place.

So a BIG thank you to Defra, Food Standards Agency, Food Standards Scotland and Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)), our Supporters (McCormick & Company, LGC Standards, Institute of Food Science and Technology, Food Industry Intelligence Network (fiin) and SSAFE), my colleagues Mark Woolfe, Stephen Ellison, Michael Walker, Felicia Golden & Gary Bird, our Advisory Board (Sterling Crew, Liz Moran, Barbara Hirst, Sophie Rollinson, Lucy Foster, Bhavna Parmar, Kasia Kazimierczak, Kerina Cheesman, Elizabeth Andoh-Kesson, Franz Ulberth, Rachel Ward & John W Spink) and all our Members and Users for your continued support.

And here's to the next five years!

The British Retail Consortium has published a new document highlighting the impact to UK consumers of leaving without a deal.

The BRC launched its “A Fair Deal for Consumers” campaign last year to stand up for consumers everywhere and ensure households can enjoy the same great value in shops long into the future. Its report, “Why Tariffs are Bad News for UK Consumers”, calls on the UK Government and the EU to negotiate a zero-tariff trade deal to avoid price increases for consumers.  

This e-learning course has been developed by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Scotland (FSS). It aims to provide you with an understanding of the theory and practice of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) exploring the method of problem-solving that identifies the causes of faults or problems in the food supply chain.

This course has been added to the Guidance Section of the Food Fraud Mitigation Section and can also be accessed here.

This e-seminar, entitled “Fish speciation for food authenticity”, will introduce the viewer to the analytical needs associated with fish speciation for food authenticity, the prevalent methods used in testing laboratories within the UK and European Union, as well as provide a summary of the scope and limitations of these methodologies. 

For further information and to watch the e-seminar go to the e-Semimars tab of the Training page.

In just a few weeks, from April 6 to June 6, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists assigned to the Los Angeles/Long Beach Seaport, intercepted 19,555 pounds of prohibited pork, chicken, beef and duck products arriving from China.

In the first five months of fiscal year 2020, the interception of prohibited meats from China at the LA/Long Beach Seaport has increased 70% compared with the same period the year before.

Most of the unmanifiested animal products were commingled in boxes of headphones, door locks, kitchenware, LCD tablets, trash bags, swim fins, cell phone covers, plastic cases and household goods in a clear attempt to smuggle the prohibited meats.

According to USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, China is a country affected by African swine fever, classical swine fever, Newcastle disease, foot-and-mouth disease, highly pathogenic avian influenza and swine vesicular disease.

Read full article.

The Food Systems Dashboard is a new tool that aims to describe global, regional and national food systems; to assess the challenges for improving diets, nutrition and health; and to guide its users to set priorities and decide on actions.

The need for this tool was identified by Jess Fanzo at Johns Hopkins University and Lawrence Haddad at The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) in 2018 when working on the team that wrote the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition report. 

The data are publicly accessible via the online Dashboard, which has a well-designed and easy-to-navigate user interface, as designed by iTech Mission with user testing and feedback from our team and additional pilot testing and modifications planned following the launch. The Figure  shows how food systems data are transformed from original data sources to metadata that can be altered through data structural changes and visual mapping resulting in graphical views of data. iTech has visual information design experience across a range of platforms, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Dashboard.

The Dashboard is intended as the primary resource for decision makers to find curated, high-quality data and analytics on their country’s food systems. The data gives users insight into the state of their food systems and their effects on nutrition and health. The Dashboard also suggests parts of the food system that may require corrective action through actionable indicators. 

Read full paper.

Business reputation and trust are as critical now as they’ve ever been.

It is the actions of our leaders, the cultures they create and the employee behaviours that they influence which correlate with how much stakeholders trust a company.

However do leaders appreciate the link between their leadership style and its impact on their teams?

Tenet’s white paper:

- Explores the key risks which arise from the way an organisation is led.

- Debates the role of leadership in driving a culture which increases the risk of fraud.

- Investigates what can be done to reverse unethical behaviour.

Read white paper.

This paper has also been added to the 'Reports' section of our Covid-19 Resource Base and our Food Fraud Mitigation section.

As food is now sourced globally, it is important that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has a good understanding of the global drivers of food fraud (root causes of why food fraud incidents occur) that impact the UK and which of the available tools can help it best protect the UK food supply from these influences.

 A Defra funded project is in progress to address these needs. A literature review and expert workshop, held in January 2020, identified food fraud drivers and food fraud mitigation tools.

The aim of this survey is to get your views on the outputs of the literature review and expert workshop so that the most commonly used tools can be selected for evaluation in phase 2 of the Defra project.

The survey will take 10 minutes or less to complete:

Complete Survey

We thank you in advance for your assistance and kindly request that the survey is completed by Friday 19 June 2020.

The Food Authenticity Network Team

The Food Authenticity Network is proud to have contributed to the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) note on Food Fraud.

Recent reports suggest the potential for increased food fraud in global food supply chains due to the impact of Covid-19.

Thus, it is vital that we continue the good practice embedded in businesses to protect the safety and security of food supply chains.

Following an extraordinary meeting of our Advisory Board on 6 May, we have gathered together information provided on the Food Authenticity Network, to help businesses secure food supply chains by mitigating food fraud, onto one page: www.foodauthenticity.uk/covid-19

European standardisation in the field of food and feed contributes to improving levels of food safety and protecting the health of consumers. CEN (European Committee for Standardization) provides validated test methods that are used by the food industry and by the competent public authorities for official control purposes and by food- and feed-producing companies for internal checks. 

Food authenticity was identified as a new area of interest and a Technical Committee was established to standardise methods in this area. At its first meeting in 2019, this committee established a series of working groups (WG) within which methods would be standardised:

WG1:   Concepts, terms and definitions

WG2:   Species analyses using DNA-based methods

WG3:   Coffee and coffee products

WG4:   NMR analysis

WG5:   Stable Isotope Analysis

WG6:   Validation concepts of non-targeted methods

It has just been announced that the UK has been voted to lead on Working Group 1 (concepts, terms and definitions):

Dr James Donarski from Fera Science Ltd will be the Convener and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will provide the Secretariat function.

The development of a common language for concepts, terms and definitions associated with food authenticity is important to securing the integrity of food and mitigating food fraud, facilitating international trade.