Food Quality Magazine
ISSUE 04 | OCTOBER 2015
Revolutionary New App Protects
Brand Owners and Consumers Against Food
Fraud while Enhancing Food Safety
Tina Brillinger, Global Food Safety Resource (GFSR)
A new partnership between Global Food Safety Resource (GFSR)
and Authenticateit, developer of
the world’s first global traceability
platform to reduce the risk of food
fraud and enhance food safety, underscores the growing danger of
food fraud and its risk of compromising consumer health and trust.
GFSR is encouraging brand owners
to consider making ingredients,
allergens, country of origin and traceability of their products more
transparent to consumers to build
trust and combat the risk of counterfeiting. Authenticateit provides an
innovative platform for transparency
including digital chain of custody to
mitigate instances of unauthorized
distribution and retailing of counterfeit food products. From a consumer
confidence and trust perspective,
this is an enormous leap forward!
According to the US Pharmacopeial
convention, the number of incidents
of food fraud increased by 60% between 2010 and 2013 and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA)
says the issue is costing the food industry between $10 and $15 billion
USD annually. The creativity of food
fraudsters to commit criminal offences, purely for profit, almost defies
description. Many businesses, and
the majority of consumers, are going about their business delightfully
ignorant of what’s been perpetrated
against them…and it puts the brand
of a business, and consumer health,
at risk. If that doesn’t seem concerning enough, take note of these
recent events:
• More than 100,000 tons of expired
frozen meat, some of it decades old,
was seized prior to sale, in China
• Manufacturers, also in China, were
found to be manufacturing fake rice
out of plastic resin and sweet potato
• In Ireland, horsemeat was substituted for beef in the scandal now
known as “Horsegate;” at least one
British grocery chain, Tesco, was
devalued by £300 million as a result
• Methanol, which can cause
blindness and death, has been involved in counterfeit booze scams in
the UK and the Czech Republic
Elsewhere it has come out that:
• Walnut crop failures resulted in
fraudulent peanut substitution that
involved coloring with banned dyes.
• Expired dairy products have been
chemically adulterated to appear
fresh
• Cheese has been smoked using
burning trash as a heat source
• Seafood labeled “fresh” was
actually frozen and then treated with
citric acid and hydrogen peroxide to
disguise how rotten it was
• Olive oil is often diluted with
lower-quality vegetable oils or spiked
with chlorophyll derivatives
• Some Southeast Asian honeys are
treated with the antibiotic chloramphenicol, which is known to cause liver damage
What’s more, over a two-month
period in 2013-14, a coordinated effort by Interpol and Europol across
33 countries in the Americas, Asia
and Europe, resulted in the seizure
of more than 1,200 tonnes of fake
or substandard food and nearly
430,000 liters of counterfeit drinks.
The operation led to the recovery of
more than 131,000 liters of oil and
vinegar, more than 80,000 biscuits
and chocolate bars, 20 tonnes of spices and condiments, 186 tonnes of
cereal, 45 tonnes of dairy products
and 42 liters of honey. Ninety-six people were arrested or detained.
This is obviously a problem of mammoth proportions and I, for one,
feel it’s long past time to sound the
alarm, rally our forces and kick it to
the curb.
Mitchell Weinberg is CEO of INSCATECH. Now working with GFSR and
Authenticateit as an associate expert, Mr. Weinberg’s company has
established a solid reputation in the
food industry as both a pioneer in,
and the sole provider of, food fraud
intelligence investigations. INSCATECH provides forensically based
vulnerability assessments, supplier
qualification examinations, validated supply chain mapping, and food
fraud vulnerability control programs.
In short, the company leads the pack
in the field of food fraud investigation
and control.
Every ingredient is
vulnerable to fraud
potentially
“Food fraud is an issue that is literally impacting people in every
single country around the world,”
Mr. Weinberg says. “Just about every single ingredient that has even
a moderate economic value is potentially vulnerable to fraud. When
you consider the health costs of
food fraud, they are enormous – to
the tune of hundreds of billions of
dollars.”
Mr. Weinberg notes that aside from
the health costs associated with food
fraud, it can potentially cause massive damage to a company’s brand
reputation when it is discovered in
the supply chain. As a result, food
service companies, producers and
retailers hire INSCATECH when they
suspect their supply chains have
been compromised. His undercover
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