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Vulnerability Assessments

What is a vulnerability assessment?

In the food industry, the term vulnerability assessment refers to a risk-assessment-style evaluation of a food’s vulnerability to food fraud.  Food fraud is deception, using food, for economic gain (Food Fraud Initiative, Michigan State University 2016).  Some organisations, particularly in the United States of America, use the phrase vulnerability assessment when referring to malicious attacks on food, such as those conducted for extortion, ideological reasons or terrorism. However those types of risks are issues of food defense rather than food fraud and those risks are not considered here.  To learn more about vulnerability assessments for food defense (intentional adulteration), click here.

A food fraud vulnerability assessment is a documented assessment that identifies vulnerabilities to food fraud and explains how those vulnerabilities were identified.

 

Why ‘vulnerability’ and not ‘risk’? 

A vulnerability assessment is slightly different to a risk assessment; risk is something that has occurred before and will occur again, it can be quantified using existing data.  A vulnerability is a weakness that can be exploited by someone or something who wishes to profit or intends harm.  A vulnerability can lead to a risk.  Because food fraud is difficult to estimate and quantify, we use the word vulnerability rather than risk.  In addition, using the word ‘vulnerability’ helps to minimise confusion in the food industry where risk assessments for food safety are commonly performed and well understood.

Why do a vulnerability assessment?

  1. To protect consumers: Food that is vulnerable to food fraud presents significant risks to consumers.  Food that is adulterated or diluted   [Read more…]

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Food safety hazards from food fraud (EMA)

Are you confident in your FSMA preventive controls for hazards from food fraud? Here’s a quick reminder about economically motivated adulteration hazards.

Hazards are chemical, physical and biological agents that may be present in food and that are capable of causing harm to consumers of the food.  (Find the official FDA definition here)

FSMA (The food safety modernization act of USA) requires that preventive controls are implemented by food manufactures to prevent hazards to human health.  The relevant regulation is called the preventive controls rule.

The preventive controls must be described by the food manufacturer in a food safety plan.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for enforcement of the rules.

The Preventive controls rules requires food manufacturers to identify and control hazards that could arise from:

  • natural occurrences (for example, some raw meat products naturally contain certain human pathogens);
  • unintentional contamination (for example food may be accidentally contaminated with a pesticide during a pest control treatment), and
  • economically motivated adulteration (EMA).

A separate part of the FSMA rules also requires food manufactures to create and implement systems to prevent adulteration of food that is perpetrated for the purposes of causing large-scale harm to consumers.  The FDA calls this type of adulteration Intentional Adulteration (IA).  The Intentional Adulteration rule, which addresses the risks from deliberate attempts to create large-scale harm, relates to issues of food defense rather than food fraud and is not related to economically motivated hazards.  Click here to learn more about food defense.

Hazards are chemical, physical and biological agents that may be present in food and that are capable of causing harm to consumers of the food

 

HAZARDS from economically motivated adulteration (EMA)

Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) is a subset of food fraud.   Food fraud includes many types of deception carried out for the purposes of economic gain.  It includes activities such as mislabeling (for example making false claims about the geographical origin of a food product) and other fraudulent activities that do not involve adulteration of food.  Economically motivated adulteration is a type of food fraud in which a person has added a substance to food to enhance its apparent value or profitability.  Often the added substance will boost the apparent quality or appearance of the food, other times the substance will be a diluent, which dilutes or replaces the genuine material with a cheaper material, thereby increasing the profitability of the resulting mix.

According to food safety laws, food manufacturers must know about hazards that may be in their products and must create and implement systems that will prevent, minimize or eliminate those hazards.  The systems must be documented in a food safety plan.

How to identify hazards from economically motivated adulteration (EMA):

  1. For each raw material used in a food manufacturing process, investigate whether economically motivated adulteration is likely to occur within the supply chain; that is, could there be adulterants present in the raw material when it is purchased?  Learn how to investigate susceptibility to food fraud here.
  2. For each raw material and each finished product, investigate whether economically motivated adulteration could occur when the product is within the manufacturing facility.  This is sometimes known as ‘insider activity’.
  3. After you have understood whether adulteration is likely to occur for each food type, make a list of adulterants that could be added to each of the susceptible food types.   Historical records of past incidences of food fraud provide the best indication of the types of adulterants that can be expected in different foods and ingredients.  This page has a list of databases you can use to find historical records. .
  4. For each possible adulterant, make a note of whether it could be hazardous to human health if present in the food.  As an example, olive oil is commonly adulterated with (non-olive) vegetable oils.  That type of adulteration is unlikely to be hazardous and as such it would not require a preventive control.   Document your decisions and justifications for such.
  5. Within the food safety plan, add the economically motivated hazards you have identified to the preventive controls systems.  Implement effective controls to  prevent or control each hazard.  Supplier approvals programs are commonly used for control of economically motivated hazards in incoming raw materials.

Need to learn more about food fraud prevention?  Visit our online training school.  Courses start at just US$29.

 

 

 

 

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Secrets of the horsemeat scandal

How did the enactment of an obscure transport law in Eastern Europe change the face of food manufacturing forever?  Karen Constable investigates the link between Romanian road rules and the horsemeat scandal.

More than six years after it first made headlines, the series of incidents that became known ‘horsegate’ continues to impact the global food industry.  It began in January 2013, when Irish authorities revealed they had discovered horsemeat in burgers that were supposed to contain 100% beef.  The discovery sparked a frenzy of testing and soon horsemeat was being discovered in dozens of different products in countries all over Europe and beyond.  The sheer scale of the contamination sent shock waves through the food manufacturing world.  Occurring five years after the melamine in milk powder scandal of 2008, which sickened over 300,000 babies in China, this incident was unfolding much closer to home for food manufacturers in Europe.  It was a wakeup call for our industry: we could no longer pretend that food fraud of a similar scale and impact as the melamine milk scandal could not happen in the western world.

Numerous massive recalls

The scandal resulted in market withdrawals of tens of millions of food products across Europe, millions of euros of lost business and multiple prosecutions.  Consumers’ trust in manufactured food plummeted and sales of frozen hamburgers and frozen ready meals dropped by 43% and 13% respectively in the United Kingdom in the month following the first product withdrawal.

Multiple investigations

Despite some media reports claiming that the first horsemeat discovery was the result of ‘routine’ testing, it is now known that the scandal was uncovered almost by accident.  As strange as it may seem to the wider community, it is unusual for food manufacturers and regulatory authorities to test foods for materials that are not expected to be present.  This is, of course, how the perpetrators of the Chinese melamine fraud could conduct their activities on such a large scale for what is thought to be a significant length of time.  The original horsemeat tests were conducted by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland because a sharp-eyed inspector had noticed a discrepancy between packaging and labelling of frozen meat.

As the investigations began it became apparent that law enforcement and regulatory authorities were ill-equipped to manage the complex cross-border issues that arose.  Supply chains seemed hopelessly complicated to unravel, with on-paper ownership of meat often disconnected from the physical whereabouts of the food.  By the time the scandal was declared over, investigators had identified at least three entirely separate supply chains involving different slaughterhouses, traders, processors and criminals.

Beef an easy target

Horsemeat and beef meat are similar in appearance, texture and flavour.  Yet the European market for horsemeat is relatively small compared with beef; it is not consumed by people in many Western European cultures. For unscrupulous merchants, however, horsemeat’s abundance and low price made it the perfect substitute for beef.   With access to a cheap, abundant adulterant, the criminals appeared to have an easy job of it.  It was so easy, in fact, that swapping horse for beef appears to have been a long-term business plan for at least one of the meat traders involved in the scandal, Jan Fasen.  Fasen had been convicted and jailed for a similar fraud in 2007.  The name of his company, Draap, is the Dutch word for horse spelt backwards.

In 2019, Fasen and his partner Hendricus Windmeijer were convicted of false labelling by a court in Paris for their role in the supply of 500 tons of meat to ready-to-eat meal-maker Comigel in France in 2012 and 2013.

Complex supply chains

Much of the horsemeat found in the affected products originated in Romania, the by-product of a unique set of circumstances which affected the availability and price of horse meat in that country.  Six years prior to the scandal, a law had been passed banning horse drawn vehicles from the streets of cities and towns in Romania.  Within a few years there was a surplus of unwanted horses, with abandoned animals roaming city streets and parks.  The horses were rounded up and exported to slaughterhouses in neighbouring countries where they were slaughtered for legitimate human and pet food.  By 2007, however, concerns about the spread of equine infectious anaemia, a disease which was endemic in Romania, resulted in a ban on the trading of live Romanian horses.  With live exports stopped, there was nowhere for the horses to go.  Enterprising local businessmen built their own slaughterhouses in Romania and began to export horse meat to Europe.

Draap Trading, a company operated from Belgium and registered in Cyprus, was among those that purchased Romanian horsemeat.  It shipped the meat to the Netherlands where it was re-labelled as beef.  From there it was sold to legitimate meat processors, including one in France who supplied the factory in Luxembourg that manufactured lasagne and spaghetti bolognese for Findus and Aldi.

Separately, a French meat processing company, À la Table de Spanghero was also purchasing horsemeat from Romania and selling it to food manufacturers labelled as beef.  The former director and manager of Spanghero were convicted for their crimes in Paris in April 2019, with the former director being jailed for his role in the saga.

Romania was not the only source, however: the burgers at the centre of the initial discovery in Ireland contained horsemeat that came not from Romania but from Britain, Germany and Poland, via another Dutch trader, Willy Selten.  In 2015 Selten was jailed for 2.5 years for crimes related to the fraudulent supply of horsemeat in 2011 and 2012.  In November 2016 he was ordered to pay €1.2m – the estimated proceeds of his crimes – to the Dutch government.

A long history of horsemeat adulteration?

Given the history of Selten and Fasen, it seems likely that undeclared horse was present in the European food supply for many years, remaining undetected and causing no apparent harm to consumers.  We will never know whether those responsible considered the safety of consumers when planning their crimes.  We do know that unsafe adulterants are more likely to be detected, which makes them less attractive to fraudsters.  Certainly, in the melamine scandal in China, just a few years prior, consumer harm played an important role in the detection of the fraud.  In that case, it is likely that low levels of melamine had been added to milk powder and other products for many months or years without causing any immediate or obvious harm to anyone.  It is thought that the concentration of melamine in baby formula increased in 2007 and 2008 and it was the higher levels that caused kidney problems in babies.  The fraud was uncovered by authorities investigating the illnesses.  Perhaps the extra melamine had been added by mistake, or perhaps the fraudsters got greedy.  Either way, the adulteration was costly for the criminals as well as their victims: two of the people responsible were executed by firing squad in China in 2009.

During the horsemeat fiasco, and to the relief of the entire industry, no person was sickened or injured by the presence of horse in ‘beef’ products.  There was, however, a major health scare: horsemeat can contain veterinary drugs, including phenylbutazone – “bute”, which can be harmful to human health.  It was a lucky coincidence that the overwhelming majority of the contaminated products proved not to contain phenylbutazone.

From horse and beef to chicken, donkey and buffalo

As investigators worked behind the scenes, public events in the European food industry took on the appearance of collapsing dominoes: first was the withdrawal of 10 million burgers by Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Dunnes Stores and Iceland in United Kingdom.  Tesco lost £300m in market value overnight.  In the following weeks, Asda also removed tens of thousands of products from its shelves; Tesco and Aldi extended their withdrawal from burgers to ready meals; Waitrose withdrew meatballs because of fears they might contain pork; slaughterhouses in Yorkshire and Wales were raided by regulatory authorities; the scandal spread to France and multiple arrests were made on both sides of the English Channel.

By the end of March 2013, authorities had found horse labelled as beef in three Polish factories; equine DNA had been found in chicken nuggets in Greece; water buffalo and donkey had been found in South African burgers and more big brands, including Ikea, Birdseye and Nestle had been affected with their products withdrawn from markets in Cyprus, Belgium, Spain and Czech Republic.

By year’s end, Tesco’s annual profits had fallen by 52%.  Consumer trust in large food manufacturers and retailers was at an all-time low: British consumer organisation ‘Which?’ reported that sixty percent of consumers had changed their shopping habits because of the scandal.

Standards updated

The British government commissioned Professor Chris Elliott to review and report on the implications of the horsemeat contamination for the British food industry.  The Elliott review, as it became known, resulted in the creation of a special food fraud crime unit in that country and the development of a range of other collaborative enterprises across Europe including special functions within the European Joint Research Council (JRC) and food-focussed operations by Interpol known as Operation Opson, now in its sixth year.

The food safety community, initially shocked and alarmed at the potential safety implications of the adulteration soon began a period of discussion and introspection, which often centred around the unspoken question ‘What if the meat had been dangerous?’.  The scandal broke at a time when the GFSI food safety standards were consolidating their revered positions at the pinnacle of ‘best practice’ manufacturing: the standards were being strengthened, lengthened and broadened.  Audit durations were increasing, auditor qualifications and certification systems had become more stringent and standards for packaging, storage and distribution had been upgraded.  And yet these GFSI-endorsed food safety management systems, considered to be the gold-standard for food manufacturing and administered with the strictest oversight, had revealed an Achilles heel the size of Bucharest.   The GFSI promptly created the ‘Food Fraud Think Tank‘ to address the gaps and suggest solutions.  This resulted in changes to GFSI’s guidance for food safety standards, with GFSI-endorsed standards being updated to reflect the updated guidance.  The new guidance requires food businesses to formally address the risks from fraudulently adulterated ingredients when they design their food safety management systems.

The food safety landscape had changed, seemingly overnight, from one that was focussed almost exclusively on unintentional or natural contamination to one that requires food manufacturers to consider, control and prevent more unpredictable and sinister events.

In the wake of these changes, a new discipline of food study has appeared.  It is now possible to study food fraud at prestigious educational institutions, attend international conferences devoted to the topic and tune in to webinars conducted by specialists in compliance, legislation and testing.  Analytical chemistry researchers are developing ever-more sophisticated test methods for detecting adulterants.  Food businesses large and small are developing better systems to prevent, deter and detect economically motivated adulteration within their supply chains.

Food manufacturers are slowly regaining the trust of consumers, helped by the visible presence of enforcement operations and government initiatives such as the United Kingdom’s Food Crime Unit and Interpol’s Operation Opson in Europe as well as the Food Safety Modernisation Act (FSMA) in the United States.

And what of the adulterated beef?  We can only guess at how many tonnes of it was eaten by unsuspecting consumers in countries all over Europe before the scandal broke.  Contaminated product that was withdrawn from the market – tens of millions of units – was destroyed; either buried in landfill or used as animal feed.  It seems a sad and wasteful journey for the unwanted horses of Romania; a journey conceived by men who wanted to be rich and one that ultimately changed the face of food manufacturing forever.

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Five things every food safety professional should know about food fraud

1. Food fraud is in the spotlight

Food fraud has been around for thousands of years but has recently become more prominent in the food safety and food certification industry, following the European horse meat scandal of 2013.  Although no food safety problems arose during that incident, it was realised that similar incidences could have serious impacts on food safety.  For that reason, food fraud and food authenticity have been introduced into most major food safety management system standards within the previous two years.

2. New terminology is being developed

Definitions related to food fraud and food integrity have been developed and refined and there is now consensus on the four key terms below, although the term food security still causes confusion at times.

food fraud,defense,safety,security

  • Food safety relates to issues of unintentional contamination, with the aim of reducing exposure to naturally occurring hazards, errors and failures in food systems.
  • Food fraud was defined by  Spink and Moyer (2011) as “a collective term used to encompass the deliberate and intentional substitution, addition, tampering, or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients, or food packaging; or false or misleading statements made about a product for economic gain.”  More recently that definition has been updated to capture all types of food crime: Food fraud is deception, using food, for economic gain (Food Fraud Initiative, Michigan State University).  Within food fraud there are types of fraud that involve tampering with the food by adulterating or diluting the food.  This type of fraud is sometimes called ‘economically motivated adulteration’ (EMA).  Other types of fraud that do not involve adulteration are also deemed to be ‘food fraud’.  These include black market and grey market sales, theft, illegal importing, avoidance of tax and counterfeiting.
  • Food defence is a term that has come to be defined as the effort to prevent acts of adulteration that are intended to cause harm to a food business or to consumers, such as acts of terrorism or attempted extortion.
  • Food security is unrelated to food fraud but is instead an issue of food supply and food access for populations who are under threat from food shortages.

Other terms to know:

  • Vulnerability assessments are assessments of vulnerability to food fraud, either at the raw material, product or facility level.  Within the USA the term vulnerability assessment often refers to a food facility’s vulnerability to malicious tampering of product on its site, either by its own employees or external forces.  Within Europe, and particularly as described in the most recent issue of the British Retail Consortium’s (BRC) food safety standard, a vulnerability assessment is an assessment of a food material’s susceptibility to food fraud.  Learn more about vulnerability assessments.
  • Horizon scanning is the act of looking for and analysing threats and opportunities that will emerge in the medium to long term.  Within the food industry, horizon scanning means the act of collecting information about current trends and predicted incidences that could increase the likelihood of food fraud for a particular food material.  For example, climate change is likely to reduce coffee production which could drive up prices and increase fraudulent activity in that sector.
Coffee,authentic,fraud,horizon scanning
Future coffee harvests are likely to be affected by climate change

 

3. Food safety standards have become more rigorous

Food fraud prevention and mitigation measures are being introduced into all major food safety management systems.  The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), a group of food companies whose mission is to harmonize, strengthen, and improve food safety management systems around the globe, sets guidance for food safety standards.  Well known GFSI standards include BRC, FSSC 22000 and SQF.  Between 2015 and 2017, all GFSI food safety standards were updated to include requirements for food companies to perform a food fraud vulnerability assessment and have a food fraud mitigation plan in place.   Click here for the GFSI Food Fraud Position Paper.

The new requirements for vulnerability assessments and mitigation plans require more resources for most food businesses, particularly those with large numbers of raw materials and suppliers.

4. There are new regulatory requirements for food businesses

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in the USA has been implemented for most food businesses in the previous few years.  Within the FSMA rules, food businesses are required to address hazards from adulterants introduced for the purposes of economic gain.  These must be included in food safety hazard analyses and if hazards are found, preventive controls must be implemented.  This means that economically motivated adulteration (EMA), a subset of food fraud, must be addressed under the new FSMA rules.

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) also includes specific requirements for ‘food defense’ which are aimed at preventing malicious adulteration and tampering as well as fraudulent adulteration.  This is known as the Intentional Adulteration (IA) rule.  The IA rule is being progressively implemented in the USA.  FSMA rules for IA will also be enforced internationally for all food facilities that manufacture food for export to America.  Click here for US FDA’s food defense guidance

food defense,vulnerability assessment,FSMA,
All American food companies will be required to have a food defense plan

 

5.  Detection of food fraud remains a challenge, despite new lab techniques

Our ability to detect food fraud has improved over the last few years, but challenges remain.  There are many technologies available, from traditional ‘wet’ chemical tests to spectroscopy and chromatography to modern forensic DNA methods.   Protein isoelectrofocusing (a type of electrophoresis) is a conventional test that provides information about the source of various milk proteins in a cheese and can be used to detect cows milk in “buffalo milk” mozzarella, for example.  PCR (polymerase chain reaction) techniques, in which a cow milk-specific gene is amplified and detected are being developed for cheese testing and they are claimed to be more specific.

Coffee variety testing has traditionally been done using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, a method that exploits the different amounts of chlorogenic acid and caffeine in robusta and arabica varieties.  However, a new method that exploits the different mitochondrial genetic markers in the two varieties will soon be able to achieve the same results quickly and easily in the field with ‘lab on a chip’ technology.

Researchers looking for fraudulent aloe vera can exploit its distinctive NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) profile, due to the position of acetate groups within a key polysaccharide in the plant.  The NMR profile represents a ‘fingerprint’ for aloe vera.

Another type of ‘fingerprinting’ is based on the spectra created by different ratios of stable isotopes.  For example, it is possible to tell the difference between corn-fed and wheat-fed chicken, using stable isotope ratio mass spectrometry by comparison with databases of reference samples.  This method has also been used to check provenance claims for meat and wine products.

Authentic beef mince
What meat is that?

 

Despite the surge in technology surrounding food fraud detection, it remains difficult to detect fraudulent adulteration unless you know what you are looking for.  As an example, DNA testing can be used to determine if beef mince has been made from a cow but can’t tell me whether it has been adulterated with undeclared beef offal.  Olive oil that is suspected of having been adulterated with other edible oil can easily be tested for such adulteration in a lab test, but verifying its country of origin is more difficult.  Adulteration of ‘arabica’ coffee with the cheaper robusta variety can be detected with a simple test but that same test will not disclose whether ground coffee has been adulterated with cheaper fillers such as corn, soybean or wheat, a practice which is common in some markets.  There are new ‘fingerprinting’ techniques that are designed to ‘flag’ any sample that is not authentic, no matter what the adulterant, however they can only be used if there is already an extensive database of authentic samples with which to compare the suspect sample.  Australian honey brand owners who were caught with supposedly inauthentic honey in an NMR-based fingerprint test claimed that the database used in the testing, which was done in Germany, was not suitable for testing Australian honeys.  Read more about the Australian honey scandal.

We have a lot of tools in our arsenal to answer questions about fraudulent food but those tools are only useful if we ask the right questions.

Need to learn more?  Want practical advice from expert food scientists? Click here for a free introductory consultation.

 

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Food Fraud; the faces behind the crimes

In our previous look at the motivations behind food fraud we discovered that it takes many forms.  From spices that contain illegal colourants, such as lead chromate in turmeric, to ‘organic’ grains that are shipped with forged documents, the types of frauds that are perpetrated with food are many and varied.

Consumers have been victims of food fraud for as long as trade itself; medieval bread was adulterated with chalk, ancient Roman wine was sweetened with lead, Americans were unwittingly fed illegal horsemeat in the 1800s and more recently, baby formula and pet food have had their apparent protein content illegally enhanced with the addition of melamine. It is easy to understand why a miller in the middle ages might have diluted his flour with chalk or an ancient winemaker might have added honey or water to his wine; the ‘enhancements’ were done to increase profits or to otherwise help their businesses, for example by being able to meet demand when materials were in short supply.

The motivation for financial gain experienced by the millers and wine-sellers of ancient times remains today and is the defining characteristic of the crimes that we now refer to as food fraud.  Michigan State University’s Food Fraud Initiative recently defined it as follows: “Food fraud is deception, using food, for economic gain” (2016).  Other crimes that involve tampering with food, say for the purposes of extortion or to cause harm to consumers, are specifically excluded from this definition.  Adulteration of food with the intention of causing harm is now widely called an issue of ‘food defense’.

It has been said that there are large networks of organised criminals working together to manufacture and supply fraudulent foods.  While that is certainly the case for some types of food fraud, that is by no means the only type of food fraud perpetrator.  There are many different people involved with food fraud and each has his or her own motivations.

Ms Natalie Crayton owns an artisan sea salt business in Scotland.  Artisan salt typically sells in retail stores for three to five times the price of ‘ordinary’ table salt.  In May of 2017, Ms Crayton’s business, Hebridean Sea Salt, was accused by local authorities of deceiving consumers by claiming that the salt was hand-produced from the waters of the Hebrides.  Investigations commenced after authorities were tipped off by a former employee.  Investors alleged that more than 80% of the product did not originate in the Hebrides but was imported from elsewhere.  Ms Crayton claimed that the foreign salt crystals were used to ‘seed’ the Hebridean water to create the product, a practice which is legitimate, but usually achieved with very much lower percentages of added seed crystal.

Local, natural sea salt, from the waters of the Scottish Hebrides…. perhaps

What is to be gained by swapping out some of the locally made salt with imported salt?  Of course that depends on the cost of production of the local salt versus the cost of the imported salt.  Alibaba is currently listing wholesale food grade sea salt at US$45 and $1000 per tonne, roughly equivalent to £0.03 to £0.77 per kg.  If an artisan producer who makes local salt at a cost of £3 per kg with a gross margin of two percent replaces just thirty percent of local salt with imported salt their gross profit could increase from around two pence per kilogram to almost seventy pence per kilogram, an increase of more than three thousand percent.  Under that scenario there are significant financial gains to be made from substituting components.  On the other hand, there is also plenty to lose.

Since the investigation into the Hebridean Sea Salt company began, it has ceased operation and its products are no longer available in the market.  The brand has been severely damaged and may never recover.  Ms Clayton may be able to defend her actions in court, or may be able to prove that allegations about the concentration of imported salt in the finished products are false.  But, whether or not the claims are upheld, her business faces financial ruin.

Like Ms Clayton, the vice president of Creation Foods, Kefir Sadiklar faces an uncertain future.  He and his family-run company were charged by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency over their supply of falsely described ‘kosher’ cheddar cheese to Jewish summer camps in 2015.  It is alleged that the company forged documents to make it appear that the cheese was kosher and put the forged documents inside boxes of non-kosher cheese.  When the boxes of cheese arrived at one of the summer camps, an employee noticed that some of the boxes bore the COR symbol, a kosher certification trademark, and some did not.  The employee requested clarification from Creation Foods, wanting to be sure that the cheese was fit to use at the camp.  According to information provided to investigators by the Kashruth Council of Canada, owner of the trademark, Sadiklar provided two certificates.  The first was for the wrong food while the second, supplied a few hours later appeared to be correct.  However, the employee must have remained suspicious, because he sent the second certificate to Kashruth Council, who noticed that it appeared to be a forgery: a single digit in the product code on the certificate had been altered to match the product code on the box of cheese.  The council contacted the police who passed the case to the food inspection agency, which is responsible for enforcing food label laws in Canada.  The resulting prosecution is the first of its type in Canada.

Creation Foods is a manufacturer of bakery products, and also acts as a distributor for products made by other businesses, including the cheese it supplied to the summer camps.  Creation Foods was certified by the Kashruth Council in 2011 and permitted to use the council’s COR symbol on some of its food products.  However, it appears to have a history of using the symbol on non-kosher products and was told to ‘cease and desist’ by the council in 2012 and again in 2013.  In 2013 the council issued an alert to businesses that had purchased cakes made by Creation Foods, claiming that the cakes were not kosher despite bearing a COR symbol on the pack and warning purchasers that Creation Food’s use of the symbol was unauthorised.

The allegations about Sadiklar and Creation Foods are damning; they imply a willingness by the company to mislead its customers on a number of occasions over a period of years.  Interestingly, the price difference between the non-kosher and kosher versions of the brand of cheese involved is said to be just two to three percent.  Does food fraud that increases profits by such a small margin generate enough extra income to justify the risks?  Perhaps.  When very large volumes of food are involved, even tiny increases in margins can make a significant difference to a company’s bottom line, but in this case large volumes are not likely to be a factor.  We do not know if Sadiklar’s motivation was to generate a little more profit from the summer camp order or whether there were other forces at play… perhaps Creation Foods was holding too much stock of non-kosher cheese that was nearing its expiry date, or perhaps they had run out of kosher cheese and risked upsetting their customer by failing to fulfil the order on time. Or perhaps the risk of facing any repercussions seemed so low that even a small monetary gain could somehow feel justified.  Sadiklar and Creation Foods denies any wrongdoing so we may never know.

On a more positive note, although the fraud that is alleged to have occurred with this incident was easy to perpetrate, it was also relatively easy to detect: the customer noticed an anomaly with the kosher symbol on the boxes, requested clarification from the supplier and then, when that did not appear quite right, attempted to verify the authenticity of the certification directly with the issuing authority.  That is an excellent way to verify the authenticity of certified materials; by contacting the certifier, especially if the certification body is well-respected or are themselves accredited.

A similar case of forged documents resulted in five years jail for the men involved.  Mahmudur Rohman and Kamal Rahman were convicted by a British court for conspiracy to commit fraud after Leicestershire food safety inspectors discovered that ‘lamb’ meat they supplied was actually turkey.  The tests were conducted as part of a local testing protocol that was implemented after the European horse meat scandal of 2013.

Investigators from the trading standards office revealed that not only was the ‘lamb’ made from an entirely different animal, but the halal certificates it had been supplied with were forged.  The company is estimated to have made profits of £300K – £400K during the period in which the frauds were occurring.

Meat seems like an ‘easy target’ for food fraud; it is not easy for customers and consumers to tell the difference between meat species, especially after it has been cooked in dishes like curries.  Energy drinks on the other hand are not often featured in news items about food fraud.  Meet Walid Jamil who, along with ten others, is being sued by an American energy drink company, Living Essentials, owner of the 5-hour Energy beverage brand.  Living Essentials claims Jamil and his associates manufactured and sold counterfeit copies of 5-hour Energy.  Jamil has a history of food fraud, having been implicated in an earlier scam in which counterfeit Pillsbury products as well as the sweeteners Equal, Splenda and Truvia were manufactured in a facility in Michigan.  No criminal or civil charges were placed against Jamil or his colleagues after that bust, so it’s little wonder that he was willing to get involved with the energy drinks scheme.

It was a big operation: the energy drink counterfeiters were manufacturing replica bottles bearing high quality labels and shrink sleeves in a warehouse in California that operated 24 hours per day and made about 1.5 million bottles a month, according to Geoffrey Potter, the lead counsel for Living Essentials. The drinks were placed into legitimate distribution channels in the guise of diverted product or returns.  Sales of the genuine drink were affected and a sales rep for Living Essentials became suspicious about the source of product in a certain retail outlet.  He sent a sample to the company’s headquarters for analysis which sparked a recall and investigation.  Potter reports that when investigators found the fraudsters there was so much money changing hands that “they had to use shopping bags to pass it out.”

How did the perpetrators make so much money?  The significantly lower operating costs incurred by a clandestine operation compared to legitimate beverage manufacturing might surprise consumers.  Clandestine manufacturing operations cut corners in every area: cleaning and sanitation, pest control services, facility maintenance, food safety systems, record-keeping, audit fees, labour costs – including through the use of illegal workers – unsafe and unhygienic equipment, substandard ingredients, non-food-grade packaging, untreated water, illegal waste disposal, substandard transport and storage conditions, failure to pay business registration fees, trademark registrations and by avoiding advertising costs.  The result is an unsafe product, unsafe work environments and loss of government revenue as well as damage to the brand owners.

Compared to Living Essentials, the fraudsters who produced fake 5-hour Energy could make product and get it to the market much more cheaply.  Worse still, although it is often said that consumers can spot ‘fake’ foods because their prices are too good to be true, counterfeiters can and do sell their products at the same price points as their legitimate counterparts.  In doing so they stand to make significant profits.  However, as we have seen, the perpetrators also have a lot to lose.  Civil penalties of $20 million were delivered in the 5-hour Energy case.  The price of food fraud can include loss of businesses and livelihood, high profile prosecutions, unwanted media attention, court appearances, jail time as well as million dollar penalties and fines.  New cases are uncovered every day by sharp-eyed customers, food inspectors and by insiders who want to do the right thing.  For those involved with food fraud, it’s only a matter of time before their crimes catch up with them.

Update: Creation Foods Company was fined CAD25,000, having pleaded guilty to the charges.

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