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Food Fraud is Frequent, but Help Flourishes

If food fraud prevention isn’t already on your list of New Year’s resolutions, add it.

Eric G

In fact, it’s never a bad time to refocus attention on food fraud, and to remember that, when it comes to what criminals are faking, packaging and labeling are in the mix just as surely as foods themselves. All players in the supply chain need to incorporate protective measures to keep out fraudulent foods and packaging.

If the goal of all your various food production and handling practices is safety, it’s easy to think of “fraud” concerns as secondary, since, after all, they usually implicate quality rather than safety.

But the growing reality is that first, food fraud is an increasingly complex realm presenting a variety of threats, and second, fraudulent food indeed does create safety problems in some situations.

Commonly accepted definitions of food fraud make it clear that it encompasses falsified or misleading packaging and labeling, though it’s usually thought of as intentional substitution, addition, tampering or misrepresentation of food or its ingredients, usually for economic gain.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and many private standards and certification bodies, food packagers are supposed to evaluate the potential for food fraud as part of their food safety, quality, and regulatory compliance programs.

The good news is that there is lots of help available for companies wanting to assess their food fraud vulnerabilities, notably from the Food Fraud Initiative and now from at least two books.

Dr. Karen Everstine, Senior Manager, Scientific Affairs at consulting firm Decernis (part of FoodChain ID), says of the new book, Food Fraud, A Global Threat with Public Health and Economic Consequences, which she edited along with Rosalee Hellberg and Steven Sklare, “the main focus of the book is understanding the regulatory and auditing requirements around food fraud prevention and commodity-specific strategies to reduce the risk within food supply chains.” Also, “The book is intended to be a practical resource that can be used by a range of food safety stakeholders.” (You can order it at pwgo.to/5839.)

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