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Understanding food fraud, its impact on global supplies
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Saturday, 16 March, 2013, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Markus Lipp and Jeffrey Moore
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fiogf49gjkf0d First Known Database Compiling Reports on Food Fraud Offers New Information on How this Practice is Affecting the Global Food Supply
Though the term may be relatively new, so-called “food fraud” is by no means a modern-day creation. In fact, known episodes of the intentional, fraudulent replacement of high-value ingredients with inexpensive ones go back centuries, from the adulteration of wine with lead salts in ancient Rome to instances of lower-quality oils being substituted for olive oil throughout history. Likely the most notorious example of the latter in recent times involved denatured rapeseed oil intended for industrial use that was sold as olive oil in Spain in 1981—a tragedy that resulted in hundreds of deaths. However, beyond the general sense that this is a long-standing problem and the handful of examples that have been well-publicised, not much about food fraud is understood on a broad level.
To begin to define this problem—with an ultimate goal of advancing the safety of the food supply—the non-profit, scientific US Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) developed a Food Fraud Database in April 2012. At that time, the searchable database compiled roughly 1,300 records including scholarly research articles and media reports of food fraud available in the public domain [1]. In January 2013, USP published its first update to the database, adding an additional 800 records—largely published in 2011 and 2012 [2]. With that update, the number of records of food fraud captured in the database increased by 60 per cent—and USP helped shed new light on particular foods vulnerable to fraud, adulterants found in these foods, scientific methods used to uncover fraud and more. This information helps paint a better picture of the threat food fraud poses to the food supply. USP intends the database to be a tool for food manufacturers, regulators, scientists and others worldwide—offering, for the first time, one location where any interested party can readily find previously unconnected information on the topic.
USP and the Role of Standards
USP is a more than 190-year-old independent organisation that sets standards to help ensure the identity, quality and purity of food ingredients, dietary supplements and pharmaceuticals. USP’s food ingredient standards are published in the Food Chemicals Codex (FCC). FCC is a compendium of more than 1,200 food ingredients, including binders, colours, flavors, preservatives and processing aids. Its scope is broad—any food ingredient legally marketed anywhere in the world is eligible to be included in the compendium.
FCC provides standards for the identity, quality and purity of food ingredients along with reference standards for determination of conformity to the specifications provided therein. On a practical level, these standards can serve as a basis for agreements between buyers (manufacturers) and sellers (suppliers) about the expected quality of an ingredient. By providing all parties with a single, independent reference point to ensure the expectations of all are met, FCC can help preserve resources and promote quality. Specific to adulteration and food fraud, these standards play a valuable role. Periodic checks using these standards can guard against unknown, substandard or adulterated substances entering the supply chain, and USP is continuously evaluating its food (and other) standards to ensure they are up-to-date, utilising modern technology and accounting for threats such as intentional manipulation of food ingredients. The USP Food Fraud Database is a complement to USP’s standards-setting activities for food ingredients.
Food fraud: Drivers and risks
Food fraud is a collective term for the deliberate substitution, addition, tampering or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients or food packaging, or false or misleading statements made about a product for economic gain. A more specific type of fraud, intentional or economically motivated adulteration of food ingredients, has been defined by USP as the fraudulent addition of non-authentic substances or removal or replacement of authentic substances without the purchaser’s knowledge for economic gain of the seller.
Food fraud traditionally is thought of as an economic issue and less a public health threat. However, food fraud presents unique risks because of the deceptive nature of the activity—the intention to trick, in contrast to more frequently reported food risks such as microbial contamination. The latter is a well-known problem that food manufacturers recognise must be controlled in their operations. In cases of food fraud, the adulterants used are often unexpected, unconventional and designed to bypass traditional testing employed by the food industry and regulators. Melamine (an industrial chemical not intended for consumption), for example, was considered neither a potential contaminant nor an adulterant in the food supply before 2007 and 2008, when pet food in the United States and other countries and milk products in China were subject to adulteration to boost apparent protein content, respectively. It is not a natural food component, and therefore no one suspected it was something to screen for in foods. As such, testing for melamine was not part of standard operating procedures for food manufacturers or regulators prior to 2007-2008. Regardless of such challenges, manufacturers are responsible for delivering a safe product to consumers, and this responsibility extends to both unintentional contamination and intentional adulteration.
From a business perspective, food fraud hurts legitimate producers in a number of ways. As manufacturers look to source the least-expensive ingredients to maintain or lower their own costs, offers of what appear to be equivalent ingredients at lower prices understandably will be attractive. Ethical suppliers providing quality products will be undercut in such scenarios, giving criminals a competitive advantage and even potentially driving ethical players out of the market. Manufacturers who unknowingly purchase these ingredients may be negatively affected, including (but not limited to) the possibility of being subject to a product recall if adulteration is discovered. The immediate financial costs of a recall are steep, but even more catastrophic from a business perspective is the potential long-term damage to a brand once it is associated with food safety problems—turning customers away in the short-term and in some cases permanently.
Though a problem throughout history, modern trends may make food fraud an even more relevant concern today. As manufacturers continually innovate with natural, functional and other “designer” ingredients, the number of high-value food components that command premium prices is growing.
Higher-priced ingredients are generally prime targets for fraud, as there is a clear economic benefit to the criminal. Coupled with the rapid globalisation of the industry, which results in long and changing supply chains that require ever more sophisticated oversight and management, economically motivated adulteration becomes especially worrisome and continuing vigilance is essential.
In this global environment, many approaches to achieving safe food chain are currently utilised by the food industry—including ISO 22000, the Global Food Safety Initiative and the British Retail Consortium. However, all food safety and quality systems rely on the ability to predict and manage reasonably foreseeable risks. In the case of economically motivated adulteration, when an unknown ingredient is introduced somewhere in the supply chain, many of these systems could be rendered ineffective. This is an area where FCC standards, coupled with information available in the USP Food Fraud Database, can play an important role.
Analyses of food fraud database records
Following compilation of the initial records in the USP Food Fraud Database, analyses of these records by USP food scientists was published in the April 5, 2012, Journal of Food Science [3]. This research revealed that milk, edible oils and spices were among the top categories where food fraud occurred as documented in scholarly reports published by scientists around the world. USP conducted additional analyses of the new records added in January 2013, which showed similar trends for 2011 and 2012, with those three categories representing more than 50 per cent of the records in the database in this time period.
The 2011-2012 records added seafood (fish, shrimp), clouding agents and lemon juice as categories vulnerable to food fraud. Some insights on specific categories and how this information can be used follows:
Milk
One utility of the USP Food Fraud Database is to help industry and regulators identify potential hazards that could appear in the food supply as adulterants. Common fraud issues found in the database for milk and milk products include watered-down milk; addition of fillers like starch, maltodextrin, sucrose or salt; addition of proteins from soya or rennet whey; replacement of milk fat with vegetable oils; undeclared addition of milk powder to fluid milk; addition of preservatives and stabilisers such as formaldehyde, boric acid, hydrogen peroxide, sodium bicarbonate and detergents; and addition of urea and melamine.
Many of these issues are familiar to India, where adulterated and “synthetic” milk has been widely reported in the mainstream media and supported by reports from government authorities and scientists. While the media attention in India is focussed on adulteration in India, it is important to provide some perspective on milk adulteration. It has been historically and continues to be a global issue. Recent scholarly reports revealing adulterated milk products in the marketplace can be found in many corners of the world, from China to Brazil to Russia to Egypt.
The USP database can bring to light historical adulteration issues that may help prevent similar future issues. As an example, consider that melamine was reported as an adulterant for protein-rich ingredients (fish meal in this particular case) as early as 1979 in Italy [4]. Reaching even further back, one will find many of the milk adulteration issues reported today seem to be echoes from the distant past. Consider that in the late 19th century, adulteration of milk with water and formaldehyde was commonplace in the United States, and a common saying from this time period in Britain went, “Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the milkman wealthy and the grocer grand [5].”
Concerns around the public health threat posed by the adulteration of milk-based food ingredients have prompted USP to lead a collaborative research project to develop new testing standards for skim milk powder. The methods under development include new technologies for assessing the identity and purity of skim milk powder along with non-targeted screening methods, and are aimed as being able to guard against not only known adulterants, but also unknown adulterants that could be used in the future. USP is seeking additional collaborators from India to help establish these standards, recognising that compositional fingerprints of authentic milk powders from different parts of the world may be slightly different and need to be accounted for in any new testing standards that will be used in the global marketplace.
Spices
Common adulteration issues with spices identified in the USP database include addition of dangerous industrial dyes to spices like chilli and paprika to enhance the colour of poor-quality ingredients; saffron adulterated with non-authentic plant parts, flowers from other plant species and spiking with synthetic colours; replacement of black pepper with papaya seeds; cutting of spices like turmeric with starch, or chilli powder with red beet powder; addition of dangerous lead to turmeric to enhance colour; and addition of extraneous matter like plant stems or husks and dirt to bulk up spices. Adulteration of spices is widely reported in Indian media, but not limited to India. Reports from Europe’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed database include reports of Sudan Red Dyes and other unauthorised dyes used as adulterants in spices originating from many countries. Besides the commonly reported public health threat of Sudan dyes in spices, another reported dangerous example of spice adulteration is the addition of lead chromate to turmeric.
Oils
Adulteration of edible oils is a well-known food adulteration issue, with extra virgin olive oil being a commonly reported target around the world. A fairly recent trend seen in the USP Food Fraud Database is reports from China on “gutter” or “swill” oil. The earliest such reports in the database are media stories from 2011 on the practice of substituting illegal recycled oils produced from kitchen waste for authentic vegetable oils. Another oil fraud issue found in the database of relevance to India is the adulteration of mustard oil with oil from Argemone mexicana (commonly called the Mexican poppy plant). Oil from the seeds of this plant visually appear very similar to those from the mustard plant, but the oil contains toxic alkaloid compounds, sanguinarine and dehydrosanguinarine, known to cause epidemic dropsy and in some cases death.
A collaborative road ahead
The USP Food Fraud Database is a dynamic tool for all parties in the supply chain as they grapple with the threats posed by food fraud. USP plans to continually update the database with timely, new reports as well as older reports that it may have missed in its initial research. The intention is for this database to be useful to parties globally, with records documenting food fraud around the world. USP is seeking food adulteration experts in India to contribute to the database to help improve its breadth and utility to users in India. To be considered for inclusion, proposed entries must include a reference (scholarly, media or government authority) to substantiate the adulteration issue. New entries can be submitted to www.foodfraud.org, where the full database also is available for anyone to use in efforts to maintain and advance a safe food supply.
References
[1] USP Food Fraud Database, available at: www.foodfraud.org.
[2] USP Food Fraud Database, available at: www.foodfraud.org.
[3] Moore and others. 2012. Development and application of a database of food ingredient fraud and economically motivated adulteration from 1980 to 2010. J. Food Sci. 77(4): R118–R126.
[4] Cattaneo P., Cantoni C. 1982. On the presence of melamine in fish meals. Tecnica Molitoria. 33: 17-18.
[5] Unknown. 1892. Pall Mall Gazzette. 30/1/1892.
(The writers are from US Pharmacopeial Convention)
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