Changing gears: the food industry on combating fraud
Food fraud is a lucrative business — it’s a $50 billion a year trade. It’s also one of the most alarming problems of the world today. It affects all areas of the food supply chain and is a pressing problem for a wide variety of food types — from meat and seafood, to salt, pepper and other condiments and spices, to beverages such as coffee, tea and wine — and as long as consumption rates climb higher and higher, the problem can only get bigger.
Fraudulent acts involving food range from mislabeling and misrepresentation to replacing ingredients altogether, from improper handling and storage of food products to the sale of substandard or contaminated food products. For many years, the World Health Organization, in cooperation with national governments around the world, have been trying to fight food fraud by implementing strict regulations on food safety. The latest approach to fighting food fraud is by turning to technology to create systems that track food sources and alert consumers of food recalls and other food safety concerns. Let’s have a look at what’s being done to fight food fraud.
Traditional approaches
While legislation varies from one country to another, there are international and food industry guidelines in place to regulate food safety and promote transparency across the supply chain. Guidelines on proper food labeling and tagging help with verifying food sources and food authenticity, although these are also easy to reproduce. The tags are also difficult to read without using specialized equipment — these tags are usually product codes, holograms, barcodes or QR codes (to name a few examples) that are used to verify the ingredients and food sources for each product, and each type of tag requires a different machine to read it.
Traditional audits also being conducted. While automation can make these surveys easier, some people still prefer to examine their vulnerabilities with a checklist manually. This is good especially since until we find a more permanent solution, regular product testing and safety inspections need to be done, but one major downside is these audits are prone to human error — something that fraudsters could work their way around and use to their advantage.
Technology as a partial solution
Newer ways of tackling the food fraud problem include different technological approaches. There’s the use of edible nanotechnology to tag and track food items themselves instead of their packaging, so that consumers can authenticate on the spot using their mobile devices instead of relying on what’s indicated on the labels. This technology, called microtags, are generally tagged as safe by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), although its application today is very limited.
There’s the creation of different databases to track food sources and report incidences of food fraud. For example, PwC and SSAFE collaborated to create a food fraud vulnerability assessment that allows companies to check for possible vulnerabilities within their organizations and mitigate the risk of food fraud. This will, however, require that companies actually use the tool — and take steps to address the vulnerabilities found.
There’s also the Food Fraud Database (FFD) developed by the US Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) to help producers and retailers make informed decisions about products on their roster that may easily be adulterated. For a more historical database, the Food Adulteration Incidents Registry (FAIR) is also a good source of information. FAIR is a compilation of historical or current events involving food fraud. The only downside of FAIR is that only records five years and older are available for free.
The promise of blockchain technology
A solution that’s generating a lot of buzz in the food industry is the use and application of blockchain technology to track food sources more accurately. Because of the decentralized nature of blockchain, no one central information source owns the system; therefore, it is difficult to tamper with — and more reliable and trustworthy than existing databases. It’s a promising technology with more functionalities coming up in the next few months, but these are all just partial solutions to the problem — it will still be up to the consumer to be vigilant with all the food products they’re buying, and it’s the responsibility of the food producers to regularly test their products until a more permanent solution is found.
To know more about SparX and how we aim to tackle the problem — read more about the rising tide of counterfeit products and our solution here. You can also find out how we’re taking the SparX blockchain platform to fight counterfeit medicines by watching our video below:
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