“Horse meat passing as beef, you could eat it, couldn’t you? And recycled frying fat from Chinese sewer drains, nothing wrong with that. It might not be the tastiest, but it probably won’t kill you, fat is fat.” With these deliberate questions, architect Gert de Vries once again showed a sliding scale in the perception of food fraud during his lecture at the MFC Event in Gorinchem, the Netherlands. “This is often trivialised, such as with the horse meat scandal. It’s different when fraudulent actions seriously threaten public health,” says De Vries. “Much food lends itself to fraud, with all its consequences.”
Lecture by Gert de Vries during the MFC Event 2016 at 20 September 2016. Other speakers and companies were also present at the event. Please click here for the photo report.
Deception is not necessarily fraud
Wrong-footing consumers is fairly innocent in many cases. “Deception is the least damaging form of fraud. It’s not much different from nonsense marketing: empty phrases that appeal to the credulity of people. Making products more attractive, even though they’ll never live up to their pretences,” De Vries explains. The home shopping channel effect: a guaranteed six-pack in two weeks by working out only five minutes per day. An empty promise, but that doesn’t make it fraud. “Food fraud is deliberately manipulating food for financial or economical gain, and the integrity and authenticity of the food is then at issue.”
There are multiple forms of food fraud. A substance can be mixed, replaced or diluted with another, inferior product. Something could also be added to the product that changes its characteristics. Producers can ‘hitch a ride’ with a label that they shouldn’t carry: non-organic products masquerading as such. By means of certain production methods, frauds can fairly easily imitate desired product characteristics — depending on the product. Besides, document falsification happens with some regularity: an incorrect geographical origin of a product, or wrongfully changing a best-before date.
Food is sensitive to fraud
“Food lends itself to fraud more than drug smuggling,” says De Vries. “A product such as saffron costs 8,000 euro per kilogram. It’s sold as a powder in spice bottles. An experienced food expert can recognise whether it’s real saffron or not. You only have to replace ten per cent with a different substance to make an 800-euro profit. That’s much more lucrative than cocaine, because the chance of being caught is much smaller, and the crime is much less risky. If you’re caught with cocaine, you are sent to prison. If you’re caught with fake saffron, at most you’ll be fined. It’s an easy way to make money without having to fear a heavy penalty. As a result, the incentive to change tack is quite large. And saffron is only a niche market, which is why it’s so distressing that such frauds are happening on a large scale with, for example, (olive) oils, fish and fish products, milk and milk products, meat and meat products, nuts and seeds, to name only a few.”
Because the possibilities for food fraud are practically unlimited, the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) often doesn’t know where exactly to look for it. Furthermore, the means to find out if products have been tampered with are not always available. For that, the authorities have to step into the shoes of the criminals and they’d need an airtight plan to prove the actual fraud. That’s easier said than done, and can often only be done with retroactive effect. De Vries: “Someone can commit fraud because opportunity happens to occur (the opportunity finder), he can actively look for it (the opportunity seeker), or he can be part of a criminal network (the Mafia). Try finding out what happens in the mind of the perpetrator. You are therefore continually playing a cat-and-mouse game, in which criminals continue looking for non-detectable fraudulent acts.”
Be warned
“Food fraud is a crime that can have deadly consequences,” De Vries warns. “Every consumer can experience those consequences. For example, in the past, white wine was diluted with antifreeze and methanol. Pure poison -several people died and some went blind, right here in Europe. A slightly more recent example is the addition of nitrogen to Chinese milk, which ended up in baby milk powder and caused kidney failure in babies: the so-called melamine scandal. Beware: food fraud is a billion dollar business with an estimated global reach of ten per cent of all products. And it’s not always backroom tampering, just as often as not it’s white-collar crime. Every company can experience it: you just need to have one buyer within a department who wants to quickly get on and does not shy away from any means to achieve that goal.” For more information:
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