The Vulnerability Assessment Helper includes an allergen warning because any product that claims to be safe for people with food allergies is particularly vulnerable if an incident of adulteration or substitution occurs in its raw materials or ingredients. An allergenic adulterant, such as a peanut flour can have deadly consequences for consumers with allergies. Read more about peanut contamination of cumin here.
Consequences (severity) of fraud on product
The Vulnerability Assessment Helper can help you to understand out how severely a product or product group would be affected by economically motivated adulteration, substitution or dilution of the raw materials or ingredients used to make your product. No matter what answer the Helper calculates, you, with advice from other experts within the business should carefully consider the impact/s, including those listed below, and make your own choice. Add your own choice to the column labelled ‘User rating’. The results table and matrix on the Results (printable) page is calculated using the ‘User rating’; if one has been entered it will override the calculated result.
Possible impacts:
Food safety risks: Any adulteration, substitution or dilution of an ingredient should be treated as a serious food safety issue as a first priority. There can be direct food safety risks to consumers from contaminated adulterants, allergenic adulterants or unhygienic handling of the ingredient during any adulteration or substitution. There can also be an indirect food safety risk to consumers from adulterants that cause chronic disease, or are carcinogenic or are lacking in nutrients that would be present in an unadulterated product.
Loss of consumer trust: Any problem with your product or product group can be catastrophic for your brand.
Indirect risks: Adulteration, substitution or dilution of an ingredient indicates a flaw in the traceability of your product, which means non-compliance with the requirements of food safety standards and regulations.
There are financial risks associated with any incidence of food fraud. If your company has a Risk Officer or an Enterprise Risk Management Plan the relevant persons should be informed of the results of your vulnerability assessment and consulted about how to prioritise the prevention and mitigation planning that comes after each vulnerability assessment.
Characterising Ingredients
Characterising Ingredients are
- ingredients or categories of ingredients which are mentioned in the name of a food or are implied as being present in a food by pictures or graphics on a food label; and
- when mentioned in the name of a food or graphically represented on a food label are used to influence the choice of a consumer by describing or establishing a special characteristic of the food or by distinguishing a food from similar foods.
Examples of products with characterising ingredients include chocolate chip ice-cream, mushroom pie.
This definition is based on The Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code – Standard 1.2.10
The Vulnerability Assessment Helper asks users to note which ingredients are characterising ingredients not because a characterising ingredient is inherently more vulnerable to economically motivated adulteration or substitution but because problems with a characterising ingredient can greatly increase the vulnerability of the product group as a whole, as well as risking non-compliance with food standards and regulations. Within the raw materials table the answer you give at ‘characterising ingredient’ does not contribute to the vulnerability calculation for that ingredient but is used when considering the overall vulnerability of the product or product group.
Licence Agreement
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Food fraud only affects expensive food, right?
Wrong! While it’s pretty obvious that you could make an economic gain by bulking out an expensive food like caviar with something less expensive, it’s also possible to make economic gains by making tiny alterations to big-volume commodities. Even switching just one or two percent of a bulk item like beef mince or rice with something cheaper can create a huge economic gain when sales are counted in the thousands or tens of thousands of tonnes.
Ground meat is one commodity that has been frequently affected by this kind of food fraud. The adulterants are typically lower grade meat or offal from the same species or meat from a cheaper species. This kind of adulteration is difficult, if not impossible for consumers to detect.
Rice is another commodity that, despite being relatively cheap, is also affected by economically motivated adulteration. The adulterants are reported to be plastic pieces, including thermal insulation materials, potato starch mixed with polymer resins and even pieces of paper rolled to look like grains. This type of fraud relies on transient and poorly documented supply chains; the person who ultimately tries to eat the rice will detect the fraud in most cases – although there are reports of people suffering digestive problems after consumption – however the source of the adulteration usually proves impossible to trace.
If rice adulteration was occurring on a big scale in Europe I suspect that increasing the requirements for paperwork and trying to improve supply chain transparency would be the chosen strategy for those tackling the issue. In the Philippines they have taken a more direct and – for now at least – more feasible approach. They have developed a hand-held scanner that uses Raman spectroscopy to detect ‘fake’ rice by distinguishing between starch and styrene acrylonitrile copolymer. Fast, cheap, easy and no paperwork needed.