Fake food: 5 common targets — and what we can do about it

Honey recently became a hot topic in the food industry because of a big problem that was brought to light: the bees are disappearing, but honey production is as lucrative as ever — and it’s all because of food fraud. It’s easy to fake honey too: producers can easily dilute it with other syrups and sweeteners, such as high fructose syrup, cane sugar or beet sugar, to name a few. This is why honey consistently makes it to the top of the list of commonly counterfeited food.
But honey is just one of the most commonly adulterated products in the food industry. Let’s have a look at other types of food most commonly targeted for fraud.
Parmesan cheese
Bloomberg did an exposition in 2016 that revealed something disturbing about the grated parmesan cheese sold on the market shelves: the “100% real grated parmesan cheese” many brands are selling are rarely ever 100% real — and some aren’t even real Romano cheese at all.
Their investigation revealed that most brands on the market add too much cellulose to their products — this is an anti-clumping agent made from wood pulp. It’s safe when in doses of 2–4%, but some brands tested as high as 8.8%. Other companies used cheaper cheddar instead of Romano — and still labeled it as 100% parmesan cheese.
Olive oil
Much like honey, olive oil is easy to adulterate — and therefore a common target for fraud. In fact, it is the most commonly targeted food product, and the reason is simple: it’s easy to dilute olive oil with other oil products. There is an abundance of oil products to choose from — from food-grade imposter oils such as vegetable oil, corn oil, peanut oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, walnut oil, palm oil or hazelnut oil, to non-food-grade (and therefore dangerous to ingest) oils such as industrial rapeseed oil.
The fraud isn’t limited to diluting olive oil with other oil products. Sometimes regular olive oil is sold as extra-virgin olive oil, and non-Italian variants are offered as the more expensive Italian ones.
Coffee
Unless you buy and grind your coffee beans yourself, chances are you could be buying coffee grounds with additives and “enhancers.” Some of the added ingredients found in coffee are twigs, coffee husks, sawdust, leaves, or roasted food products passed off as ground coffee. In other cases, lower-grade coffee beans are passed off as premium coffee beans and sold at a higher price.
Meat
There are many ways meat is targeted by food fraudsters: from selling “double-dead” meat, which is meat from an already dead animal being sold as “freshly butchered” — and therefore a health hazard; to improperly stored meat products; to selling substandard meat as high-end products, as in the case of wagyu and kobe beef. Less drastic, but just as fraudulent, cases involve meat being treated with food coloring or injected with water to make them look fresher than they actually are. And then there is, of course, substituting beef for other meat products that look similar, such as horse meat.
Seafood
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released a 2018 report that reveals the most common type of fish fraud is mislabeling and species substitution. This is true for species such as the red snapper, which is 94% of the time not red snapper unless you buy it whole; and lobsters, which are often substituted for lower-cost shellfish meat. The FAO reports that in 55 countries worldwide, on average, 20% of fish products are mislabeled.
What we can do about it
There is a growing need to accurately track food sources. Unless you buy and source your raw ingredients from local producers, or grow and cultivate these items and other commonly-adulterated food items on your own, the chances are high that you will get a fake or at least substandard product.
The time is ripe for a multi-faceted solution: a system for tracking food sources accurately and reliably, so consumers know what’s going from farms and producers to their tables; more stringent implementation of food safety and food importation legislation; and consistent inspection of food products before they enter the market to ensure premium quality.
You can also read more about the rising tide of counterfeit products and our solution here.
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