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Acronym Decoder

BRC: British Retail Consortium.  A group of British companies that publish guidance and standards for food manufacturers, including a food safety standard that is also commonly referred to as BRC.

CoOL or COOL: Country of Origin Labelling.

EMA: Economically motivated adulteration or substitution. EMA is a subset of food fraud and is defined as the fraudulent, intentional substitution or addition of a substance, or dilution of a substance for the purposes of economic gain.  Non-EMA food fraud includes black market importation and trading of food and alcoholic beverages for the purposes of avoiding duty and taxes.

DEFRA: The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, a United Kingdom government department responsible for food production and standards as well as environmental and agricultural responsibilities.

FDA:  Food and Drugs Administration.  The FDA is the name of a regulatory body in a number of countries, including USA, Philippines and India.

FSA: Food Standards Agency, a United Kingdom government regulatory body.

FSMA: Sometimes pronounced ‘Fizzmah’.  Stands for Food Safety Modernisation Act (United States of America).

FSSC 22000: A food safety management system standard similar to ISO 22000 but with extra requirements incorporated to meet the requirements of a GFSI standard.

GFSI: Global Food Safety Initiative.  The GFSI is a group of food companies whose mission is to harmonize, strengthen, and improve food safety management systems around the globe.  The GFSI provides direction and approval to organizations that create food safety management systems, so a GFSI-approved food safety standard is one that represents international best practice.  Well known GFSI standards include BRC, FSSC 22000 and SQF.

GMO: Genetically Modified Organism.

HACCP:  HACCP is a set of principles designed to control and prevent food safety risks during food production.  The principles of HACCP are codified (written down) by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).  Download the 2020 revision of the HACCP Code here.

HARCP: Hazard Analysis Risk-based Preventive Control.  HARCP = food safety as legislated by the United States.  This acronymn being used by some in the USA when talking about the requirements of the recently enacted Food Safety Modernisation Act (FSMA) in that country.  HARCP is claimed to differ from HACCP by including requirements for preventive controls.  Read more about HARCP here.

IA: Intentional Adulteration.  Within the US Food Safety Modernisation Act (FSMA), Intentional Adulteration specifically refers to malicious adulteration that is intended to cause widescale harm.  Learn more about intentional adulteration here.

ISO 22000:  ISO is the International Organization for Standardization.  They have thousands of standards across many different businesses, products and systems.  ISO 22000 is the ISO standard for food safety management systems.  Like other major food safety management systems it is based on the principles of HACCP.

NSF:  a pseudo-government organization head-quartered in the United States that is active in the area of food safety and sanitation.

SQF:  Safe Quality Food Institute.  The Safe Quality Food Institute owns and publishes a group of food safety standards also known as SQF that is a GFSI – approved standard.

USP: United States Pharmacopeial Convention.  USP is a non-profit organization that creates identity and purity standards for food ingredients and food chemicals, as well as for medical drugs.

TACCP: Threat Assessment Critical Control Point.  TACCP = prevention of malicious threats to food.

VACCP: Vulnerability Assessment Critical Control Point.  VACCP = food fraud prevention.  Learn more about TACCP and VACCP here.

Learn about Vulnerability Assessments, what they are and how to do them, here.

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The Cost of Deception (the not-so-sweet-story of an ice cream company’s food fraud)

Food fraud takes many forms.  When a food company makes deceptive claims about its products to gain an economic advantage, that is food fraud.  The American company Blue Bell Creameries created a deadly food fraud incident in 2015.  Now the former president is facing a grand jury and potential jail time over his role in the affair.

At a glance:

  • Blue Bell and its former president have been accused of covering up food safety problems.
  • Three people died and at least 10 more were sickened by dangerous bacteria after eating Blue Bell ice cream.
  • After authorities stepped in, the company had to shut down production, lay off a third of its workforce and risked liquidation.
  • The former president of the company is facing a grand jury on fraud charges and, if found guilty, could be jailed.
  • The company has already paid fines and penalties totaling more than $19 million.

Blue Bell Creameries is one of America’s largest ice cream manufacturers.  Early in 2015, Texan authorities notified Blue Bell that two of its products contained a dangerous bacterium: Listeria monocytogenes. Listeria isn’t your average run-of-the-mill food poisoning bacterium; it has a high mortality rate in vulnerable populations, affects pregnant mothers and older people severely, causes miscarriages, stillbirths and deaths.  The other scary thing about Listeria is that it survives – even thrives – in low temperatures.  Like in ice cream.

For an ice cream company, finding Listeria in your product is a terrible thing.  Your consumers are in danger and should be protected at all costs.  All the affected product should be immediately recalled from the marketplace, customers should be informed of the problems, consumers should be told to discard the food, more testing should be done to see how many other products are affected and manufacturing should be halted until the source of the contamination has been found and eliminated.  As you might imagine, the costs to the company can be astronomical.  Worse still, the damage to a brand from having to tell consumers that there is a dangerous pathogen in your food can be severe.

In February 2015, Blue Bell knew there was Listeria in its products.  Yet it did not tell its customers.  Instead, it’s alleged that Blue Bell’s president, Paul Kruse, chose to cover up the Listeria problem.  He allegedly directed that the Listeria testing program be discontinued. He did not immediately initiate a recall, despite supposedly telling authorities that one was underway.   He put consumers at risk.  Three people died and at least 10 became ill from the Blue Bell outbreak.  Paul Kruse has been charged with seven counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and will be appearing before a grand jury in Texas next week.  If found guilty he could be jailed.

A recall did eventually get underway, in April 2015.  Consumers were alerted, the company had to shut down production, resulting in mass lay offs and causing liquidity problems.

The company has already pleaded guilty to distributing adulterated food products.  It was sentenced to pay criminal penalties of $17.25 million.  Separate civil claims have been paid out by Blue Bell after shareholders and customers, including the American military, alleged that the ice cream was manufactured in unsanitary conditions and that management paid little regard to food safety ‘red flags’.  The total monies paid in fines, forfeits and civil settlements amount to $19.35 million, the second largest amount paid for a food safety matter.

Often, when people talk about food fraud, they focus on adulteration, like ‘fake’ honey made from sugar water.  But food fraud takes many forms.  In the case of the deadly Blue Bell Listeria Outbreak, it can come at a high cost to the perpetrators and an even higher cost to consumers.

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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 become more prominent in the food safety and food certification industry in the last few years, 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 prevention requirements were introduced into all major food safety management system standards between 2017 and 2020.

2. New terminology

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

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 can also refer to a food facility’s vulnerability to malicious tampering of product on its site, either by its own employees or external forces.   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
Coffee harvests are being affected by climate change

 

3. Food safety standards have become more rigorous

Food fraud prevention and mitigation measures are now a requirement of all major food safety management system standards.  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 now a number of ‘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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Love and other illegal ingredients; food fraud news for November

Fish fraud decreasing?

Great news for Canadians, with a recent ‘citizen science’ survey finding very low levels of fish fraud at the retail level.  The study was organised by SeaChoice with the support of  the University of Guelph Centre for Biodiversity Genomics’ Life Scanner program.  Participants used DNA kits to sample fish from local grocery stores across the country.  In all, 501 samples from 49 retailers and representing 46 species were tested.  Just 1% were found to be fraudulently mis-labelled, while 7% were not labelled according to the proper names defined by Canadian regulations.  These numbers are lower than expected and – we hope – the start of a trend towards better traceability and less fraud in the seafood industry.

Gorgeous, but toxic ‘silver’ sweets

Intricately decorated festival sweets in India have been a well-known food fraud risk for many years; unfortunately they are frequently found to have been coloured with cheap and toxic textile dyes rather than approved food additives.  On the eve of the Diwali festival this year, Indian authorities tested sweets and found they contained non-food colours.  In addition, the beautiful silver gilding on some sweets was in fact made from dangerous aluminium, rather than from silver, which is inert and safe to ingest.

Hot dogs in peril

Hot dog sellers in Belgium are worrying about the price of mustard, after the world’s largest producer of mustard seeds, Canada, reported a very small harvest this year.  It is only half of the previous year and the lowest volumes in 11 years.  This is expected to effect supplies and prices of mustard which will increase the risk of food fraud.

Red, red wine

Chapitalization – the act of adding sugar to the wine making process to boost final alcohol content, is the subject of a recent crackdown by Spanish authorities. Chapitalization is not permitted in Spain, although it is allowed in some wine growing regions elsewhere.

 ¡Ay no: carne de caballo

Despite being one of the best known types of food fraud, we are still finding undeclared horse meat in beef, including recently in Mexico.  Horse meat is not illegal in Mexico, however it is not supposed to be present in beef meat.  A recent study found it at rates of around 10% of ‘beef’ products purchased from public markets, street stalls, butchers shops and taco stands.  Worse still, more than half of the meat samples that contained horse DNA also contained clenbuterol, an illegal growth enhancer.

US FDA: not loving love

The US FDA has ventured into philosophical territory by sending a pubic warning letter to the owners of a food manufacturer in Massachusetts for mis-branding their granola by declaring that it contains love.  According to the FDA, “Love is not a common or usual name of an ingredient, and is considered to be intervening material because it is not part of the common or usual name of the ingredient.” Oh FDA, you heart-breakers!

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Natural caffeine. From the things that make me go hmmm files (a food scientist’s perspective)

energy drink claim label natural caffeine
This energy drink contains ‘natural caffeine’. Hmmm…

This afternoon I saw an advertisement for an energy drink that contains

  • No Taurine (sounds okay to me) and
  • Natural Caffeine.

Natural Caffeine.  What is natural caffeine? Actually what is not-natural caffeine?

I did some research and it turns out that the term ‘natural caffeine’ is sometimes used to describe caffeine that has not been synthesised in a laboratory or chemical factory.  Synthetic caffeine and caffeine from natural sources are chemically indistinguishable, so I am not sure why anyone would bother to make the distinction, but it does raise some interesting questions about the use of the word ‘natural’ in food and beverage marketing.   This is becoming a hot topic in food labeling and regulatory circles, and one that is not going to go away.  In fact, the USA FDA has embarked upon an ambitious project to define the term and provide guidance for food labels.  We await the results with bated breath.  In the meantime, I will stick to my favourite source of caffeine; natural, preservative-free black coffee.