TOOLS GUIDES AND REPORTS

A number of organisations have published a variety of different initiatives aimed at preventing food fraud. For convenience, information from some  of the global initiatives has been grouped into the following categories:

  1. Tools
  2. Food fraud mitigation guides
  3. Food fraud reports

Please note that major global services, guidance and reports known to the Food Authenticity Team have been presented here. It is not a comprehensive list of all available information in this area. However, if you know of an important piece of information that is not featured then please do email us on Secretary@foodauthenticity.uk.

 

 

      1. Horizon Scan - Food Integrity Horizon Scanning
      2. Decernis Food Fraud Database
      3. Food Industry Intelligence Network (FIIN)
      4. The Food Protection and Defense Institute & Economically Motivated Adulteration Databases
      5. The Food Protection and Defense Institute’s World Factbook of Food
      6. SSAFE food fraud vulnerability assessment tool
      7. Food Integrity Knowledge Base
      8. Food Authenticity Research Network Hub (FARNHub)
      9. IFT’s Global Food Traceability Center - Demystifying Traceability
      10. Muddy Boots
      11. MEDISYS and JRC Monthly e-mail summaries
      12. FADB-CHINA
      13. FoodExperts
      14. NFCU food fraud resilience self-assessment tool
      15. Safety HUD
      16. BaTAnS
      17. Food fraud screening model (FFIS)
      18. GHI Whistleblower Food Safety Incident Report Site
      19. EDF Checklist
      20. FSS Food Crime Risk Profiling Tool
      21. IAEA Chemometrics Add-in for Excel

1. Horizon Scan - Food Integrity Horizon Scanning

HorizonScan is a subscription based food integrity tool that helps you to maintain the integrity and reputation of the food you trade. HorizonScan monitors global food integrity issues, allowing you to plan and ensure consumer safety and protect brand identity.

HorizonScan can help you:

          • Save time in finding the information that you need
          • Be informed as soon as possible of any potential emerging threats to your supply chain
          • Check potential suppliers and exporting countries for previous food integrity issues
          • Find information to help you in planning monitoring programmes to ensure you don’t get caught out by unexpected residue or contaminant issues.

For further information visit: https://horizon-scan.fera.co.uk/

Top ^^

 

2. Decernis Food Fraud Database 

Previously, this was USP’s Food Fraud Database version 2.0. The Food Fraud Database is now owned and operated by Decernis.

Decernis’ Food Fraud Database is a continuously updated collection of thousands of ingredients and related records gathered from scientific literature, media publications, regulatory reports, judicial records, and trade associations from around the world. FFD v2.0 is available through an annual subscription.

New Features:

          • Enhanced with four record types including incident and inference reports, surveillance records, analytical methods that can be accessed specifically for your ingredients of interest
          • Identify trends and vulnerabilities through a customizable dashboard, powerful search capabilities, and automated analytics
          • Weekly email alerts on new records
          • EMA Hazard Identification Report generator supports compliance with FSMA requirements.

For further information visit: https://decernis.com/solutions/food-fraud-database/

Top ^^

 

3. Food Industry Intelligence Network (FIIN)

FIIN was established by industry technical leaders to share intelligence on food authenticity. FIIN currently has 21 members in the UK including major retailers, manufacturers and food service companies.

Campden BRI curate a database to collect anonymised (via Legal host) industry data on food authenticity testing. This data is analysed to produce regular reports for the FIIN members. Campden BRI are also be responsible for managing the FIIN membership and organising FIIN events.

If you are interested in joining FIIN, please contact https://www.fiin.co.uk/

 Top ^^

 

4. The Food Protection and Defense Institute’s Economically Motivated Adulteration Databases

The Food Protection and Defense Institute (FPDI), formerly known as the National Center for Food Protection and Defense, was officially launched as a Homeland Security Center of Excellence in July 2004 at the University of Minnesota. Developed as a multidisciplinary and action-oriented research consortium, FPDI addresses the vulnerability of the nation's food system. FPDI takes a comprehensive, farm-to-table view of the food system, encompassing all aspects from primary production through transportation and food processing to retail and food service.

The FPDI EMA project focuses on learning from past EMA incidents and developing tools to help detect and deter future incidents. The NCFPD EMA Incident Database catalogs and details a wide range of unique incidents of EMA in 16 different categories. The database is searchable by incident characteristics such as food adulterant, production location, morbidity/mortality, and date. NCFPD is also collaborating with United States Pharmacopeia to evaluate the EMA vulnerability of the 1,100 monographs in the Food Chemicals Codex (FCC), a compendium of quality and purity specifications and methods for food ingredients. These databases enable industry and government to better evaluate the risk of EMA to assist in focusing resource allocation. Finally, we are exploring analysis of alternate data sources (such as import data) that could alert us to heightened EMA risk in food products in the future.

Visit FoodSHIELD to request membership to access the EMA databases, and other useful tools and resources.

Top ^^

5. The Food Protection and Defense Institute’s World Factbook of Food

The World Factbook of Food is designed to serve as a central reference repository of data related to food. Organized into a series of food and country profiles, the World Factbook of Food provides users with a wide range of food and agriculture data at the food and country level.

Data is collected, curated, and routinely updated from numerous sources on a variety of topics including production, trade, common food and non-food uses, seasonality, processing steps and supply chain structure, food safety concerns, and past intentional adulteration events. Data is displayed in an easy to use website, including interactive graphs and detailed source information.

To access or purchase the World Factbook of Food visit:https://foodprotection.umn.edu/world-factbook-food

 Top ^^

 

6. SSAFE food fraud vulnerability assessment tool

SSAFE's food fraud vulnerability assessment tool can help companies identify vulnerabilities and reduce fraud threats.This tool helps inform you of vulnerabilities in your organisation so you can put in place measures to reduce the likelihood of criminals profiting from food fraud at your expense.

It is a freely available and anonymous tool that can be used by every company anywhere. The assessment will give you a profile of your company’s potential food fraud vulnerability, which can form the basis for the development of controls to reduce identified vulnerabilities. 

The tool is now available in eleven languages.

Ready to get started? Assess your fraud vulnerabilities by downloading the SSAFE tool here.

 

7. Food Integrity Knowledge Base

The integrity of European foods is under constant threat from fraudulently labelled imitations that try to exploit that added value. The FoodIntegrity project (European Union funded) will directly address this issue and will be an international focal point for harmonisation and exploitation of research and technology for insuring the integrity of European food. Comprising an inner core of project participants from industry, academia, research institutes, technology providers and a global network of stakeholders, FoodIntegrity will rationalise and harmonise capability to provide a coherent structure and process for assuring the food supply.

Read further information at: https://secure.fera.defra.gov.uk/foodintegrity/index.cfm

The FoodIntegrity project is due to be completed by December 2018. Between now and then, numerous tools and reports in support of securing the integrity of the food supply chain will be produced. One project in particular is of direct relevance to food authenticity testing and is called Knowledge Base. FoodIntegrity Knowledge Base is an information resource on food authenticity that will support industry's and enforcement bodies' efforts to combat food fraud. Knowledge Base will bring together available information on food authenticity issues and related food commodities, suitable analytical tools and associated reference data in a Web-based searchable system.

It is anticipated that Knowledge Base will be launched in early 2018 and the European Commission has committed to maintaining the database beyond December 2018.

Top ^^

  

8. Food Authenticity Research Network Hub (FARNHub)

As part of the EU Project Authent-Net, the Norwegian Food Research Agency (Nofima)  and Belgium's Centre Wallon de Recherches Agronomique (CRA-W) have developed a database to help prevent another major food fraud incident. The database FARNHub (Food Authenticity Research Network Hub) has a web searcher  for any news on food authenticity or fraud from around the world. The database contains information on research publications, regulations, funders of food authenticity research, and on-line databases of incidents. Information on reasearch projects and methods will be available through links to the FoodIntegrity  Knowledge Base (KB) (No.7 above) when it is transferred to JRC Geel.

Top ^^

  

9. IFT’s Global Food Traceability Center - Demystifying Traceability

This course has been developed by IFT’s Global Food Traceability Center to help companies build an effective food traceability plan. The new, customizable food traceability learning experience will help small to mid-size companies and their supply chains to either evaluate the effectiveness of their existing traceability plans and/or create new ones. The online course provides a range of options from minimal level of traceability to best practice.

It includes the following:

          • risk analyses (product and process risks)
          • vulnerability assessments (for traceability)
          • consequence management (for impact) 

Further details.

Top ^^

 

10. Muddy Boots (Supply Chain Management)

With over 20 years' experience in the fresh food sector, we have developed a suite of software solutions that allows data to pass up and down supply chains from farm to retailer, providing insight that enables customers to instantly view, manage and report on the quality, traceability, and compliance of their products and suppliers.

Whether you're a Farmer, Agronomist, Supplier/Processor or Retailer/Brandholder, pick up the phone or email us to talk to one of our agricultural and supply chain experts. You'll find our details on our contact page. Alternatively, select one of the options below to find out more about how our software solutions can help you.

Further information:

https://en.muddyboots.com/

Top ^^

11. MEDISYS and JRC Monthly Summary e-mails

MEDISYS (Medical Information System) is a media monitoring system providing event-based surveillance to rapidly identify potential public health threats using information from media reports. There is a standalone module for collating media reports of food fraud incidents. The information processed by MEDISYS is derived from the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) developed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC).

Users can sign up directly to the MEDISYS app (here) or can sign up to receive the JRC's monthly e-mail summary report of MEDISYS food fraud entries (here)

 

Top ^^

 

12. FADB-CHINA

Research led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences collected 961 cases of food adulteration between 1998 and 2019 from the literature reports and announcements released by the Chinese government. Critical molecules were manually annotated in food adulteration substances as determined by food chemists, to build the first food adulteration database in China (http://www.rxnfinder.org/FADB-China/). This database is also the first molecular-level food adulteration database worldwide.

Additionally, the researchers propose an in silico method for predicting potentially illegal food additives on the basis of molecular fingerprints and similarity algorithms. Using this algorithm, we predict 1,919 chemicals that may be illegally added to food; these predictions can effectively assist in the discovery and prevention of emerging food adulteration.

The publication of this research has been published in Food Chemistry, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2020.127010   

Top ^^

 

13. FoodExperts

Unique web-based platform for data management. Multiple sectorial applications hosted that allow the interaction between supplier and their customers.

https://web.food-experts.com/

 Top ^^

14. NFCU food fraud resilience self-assessment tool

The National Food Crime Unit (NFCU) has developed this food fraud resilience self-assessment tool to support businesses in developing and implementing their counter-fraud strategy.

The self-assessment tool covers different areas that businesses will need to be aware of so that they can better identify and address process issues.

Access the NFCU's food fraud resilience self-assessment tool here.

 Top ^^

15. Safety HUD

Safety HUD, an online database tool offered by Mérieux NutriSciences, monitors international food fraud and safety alerts to reinforce the risk assessment of food products and raw materials, with the aim of increasing the security of global food supply chains.

The tool can be found at: https://regulatory.mxns.com/en/safety-hud 

 Top ^^

16. Barcoding Table for Animal Species

The German §64 Food and Feed Law Methods Group for Animal and Plant Speciation has developed a tool that will help scientists to quickly determine which species can be detected and which cannot with a specific set of primers. The tool is called BaTAnS (Barcoding Table for Animal Species) lists relevant publications, identifies the level of validation that has been performed for a specific method (and set of primers).

The latest version of the tool can be found at: BaTAnS – Barcording of Animal Species - FOCOS (focos-food.com)

 Top ^^

17. Food Fraud Screening model (FFIS)

ERM risk assessment occurs into two stages: (1) a qualitative initial screening followed by (2) a more detailed quantitative assessment. All types of Food Fraud can result in enterprise-wide risks so an enterprise risk management system must cover all types of vulnerabilities.

The model developed in this paper addresses the unmet need of the first stage referred to here as the Food Fraud Initial Screening (FFIS).

Access the full paper here.

 Top ^^

 

18. GHI Whistleblower Food Safety Incident Report Site

The Global Harmonization Initiative's (GHI) Whistleblower Food Safety Incident Report Site is now available in over 30 languages at: https://whistle.globalharmonization.net to anyone, in any country, who works in the food and beverage industry.

Until now, there has never been a global reporting system for food safety concerns that is really anonymous. As a deterrent to unscrupulous food suppliers, the GHI first launched the Whistleblower Food Safety Incident Report site in August 2021 in English, and it is now available in over 30 languages. 

 Top ^^

 

19. European Distribution Fraud (EDF): Prevention Checklist

European Distribution Fraud (EDF) is where an individual or group, imitates the details of a legitimate company, to pass credit checks and purchase goods. Once they have received the goods, they become uncontactable leaving the supplier to face a financial loss. EDF can be committed in many ways depending on the
individuals, while some attempts are more blatant others are more strategically planned. 

This document is designed to help protect businesses from becoming a victim of EDF by sharing best practice. Shared below are checks you may wish to add into your current procedures, to protect your business and enable you to recognise the signs of EDF attempts.

Read Checklist.

 Top ^^

20. FSS Food Crime Risk Profiling Tool

Food Standards Scotland (FSS) has launched its Food Crime Risk Profiling Tool, an online programme which allows companies to assess their vulnerabilities to criminality.

Using the tool allows businesses to assess themselves against a series of statements on topics, such as how they source materials and their supply methods, before being given an individual report at the end which will highlight areas of good practice as well including specific guidance on areas they may wish to improve on.

To support businesses through this process, FSS will be holding several free online workshops in 2023 to help develop opportunities to increase authenticity and improve food crime resilience – those who sign up to the tool will receive an invite to the workshops.

For more information and to sign up to the tool, visit: https://www.foodstandards.gov.scot/food-crime-risk-profiling-tool

 Top ^^

21. IAEA Chemometrics Add-in for Excel

This free tool, and associated free e-learning, covers Principle Component Analysis, Regression, SIMCA and Partial Least Squares Discrimination Analysis.  These are the basic techniques in building classification models from multivariate analytical data (e.g. spectra) obtained from authentic reference samples.

Sign-in and download details are on our e-Learning page.

Top ^^