Mislabelled chocolate, fake olive oil: the UK’s food fraud threat is growing

When a family bought an innocent-looking dark chocolate bar at a market in Mansfield last year, they had no idea of the nightmare about to ensue. Just hours after eating it, they became severely ill. Two children were rushed to hospital, and it was later discovered that the chocolate, which was mislabelled and unbranded, contained traces of hallucinogens.

It’s just one example of rising food fraud cases in everything from olive oil – a particular target, due to the premiums paid for extra virgin – to alcohol. This week, the FSA warned consumers against fake bottles of Glen’s Vodka that contained isopropyl alcohol, which is not intended for human consumption.

Professor Chris Elliott, a food safety expert who led the horsemeat investigations more than 10 years ago, believes it’s a snowballing issue. A series of factors – from post-Brexit regulatory divergence and supply chain disruptions to the climate crisis and rising online crime – are converging to create “absolute chaos” in terms of food safety in the UK, he warns.

But how much of a rise in food fraud cases are we witnessing? And what’s being done to combat it?

Incidents such as the adulterated chocolate and Glen’s have made headlines because of their extreme nature. But most food fraud is less extreme, and far more pervasive, than most people might think – accounting for up to 25% of food safety cases, according to data from the Food Authenticity Network.

Even that is just the “tip of the iceberg”, believes Professor Lisa Jack, an expert in food systems crime at the University of Portsmouth. Most food fraud incidents go undetected, making it hard to get accurate data.

That means estimates vary. In the UK alone, the cost of food fraud to consumers, businesses and government can range from £410m to £1.96bn per year, the FSA’s ‘Cost of Food Crime’ research found last year.

But there’s no doubt many will have been on the receiving end. Jack chuckles as she recounts how “friends of mine used to say: ‘I didn’t used to like goat cheese, but it’s a lot more palatable now’. They didn’t realise it was being mixed with cow or sheep cheese.”

Today, experts are warning of a growing catalogue of incidents. These can include mislabelling, misrepresenting ingredients, tampering or bulking otherwise genuine products with other ingredients, illegal processing, falsifying documents and waste diversion.

That’s partly due to skyrocketing prices, which mean “food fraud is never far away”, says Richard Leathers, global quality lead at food science company Campden BRI. The effect is only being compounded by the immense stress on global supply chains due to crises such as Covid-19, the Ukraine war and now the Red Sea conflict, paired with the strain on the drought-struck Panama Canal route. Furthermore, the effects of climate change on harvests and extreme weather events can all act as triggers for potential food fraud, a recent Campden BRI report warned.

For an example of the impact, look no further than olive oil – which is experiencing unprecedented supply shortages and price increases. The EU reported a record number of potential olive oil fraud and mislabelling cases in the first quarter of this year. In a large operation in southern Italy in July, officials broke up a racket selling fake olive oil, confiscating 42 tonnes of the extra virgin variety worth almost $1m.

“We’ve found a huge amount of food fraud online – they can basically sell whatever they want. That’s what we’re up against”

Chris Elliott

Meanwhile, an FSA report earlier this year also found that lead dyes, chalk dust and brick dust were being used to bulk up spices. “There’s no doubt there are a lot of cost pressures in the supply chain,” says food safety consultant Alec Kyriakides, who was Sainsbury’s head of quality, safety & supplier performance for nearly 30 years. “We’re left with commodities and products that are at their highest price for many years – and that drives the food system into ways to reduce costs that might have increased risk.”

However, he argues “from a food industry perspective, it is structurally more robust now than it has ever been in terms of controls”, including regular audits and sampling, as well as third-party accreditation schemes such as the food safety standards-focused BRCGS. “There are greater challenges, but I don’t feel the system is less secure than in the past,” he adds.

Andrew Quinn, head of the FSA’s National Food Crime Unit (NFCU), is keen to point out the UK has “some of the safest and most authentic food in the world”. According to FSA data from February this year, 97% of the foods tested for authenticity passed.

The hard-to-measure nature of food fraud is part of the reason why the FSA refrains from saying whether the issue is actually growing. In terms of reported incident, there has been no uptick, it tells The Grocer.

Quinn concedes, though, that “even small levels of food fraud are unacceptable” and can hinder public trust in industry and government.

Incidents like last year’s meat scandal – involving a prominent supplier that sold mislabelled and possibly rotten meat to supermarkets including Booths, hospitals and schools for several years – certainly can undermine trust. Given the strict controls and several lines of defence the UK has against food fraud (right), it’s difficult to understand how the transgression happened.

“Things almost have to align” for an incident of that gravity to go unnoticed for so long, says Kyriakides, with all defences somehow failing at the same time. As a consumer protection body, the FSA naturally took a lot of flak. But power to investigate is irrelevant without boots on the ground, and the scandal highlighted the pressure local authorities are under due to the loosening of trading standards enforcement.

Outgoing FSA chief Emily Miles has been a vocal critic of the staggering loss of Trading Standards officers – from 560 in 2013 (post-horsegate) to 345 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland at the latest count.

She is justifiably frustrated about the impact: “There was one moment last year [when] we wanted to do an unannounced inspection of a meat plant… but the council involved had one Trading Standards officer working for them, who was on leave. That’s the level of officer capability that we’re falling to sometimes.”

A lack of lab testing capacity is also holding back the FSA, notes Jack. Following the scandal – and in one of Miles’ last efforts to improve things before taking on a new role at Defra this month – the agency underwent a major shake-up that changed the way resources were allocated and information is shared.

Post-Brexit border controls

A reported slackening of checks and balances at the UK’s borders has also been identified as a blind spot in the fight against food fraud. Rishi Sunak’s government introduced new document and physical checks on EU goods from April this year, having delayed the measures five times since leaving the bloc in 2021.

Traders have claimed IT meltdowns and delays at Britain’s busiest point of entry near Dover have led to trucks being waved in without proper physical checks.

Port authorities also sounded the alarm over Defra’s plans to cut funding for illegal meat checks at Dover by up to 70%. It’s a particular concern given these teams are in charge of apprehending unlawfully imported meat from countries where African swine fever is a known risk, and reporting that data to the FSA.

Withdrawing from the customs union and single market also resulted in deteriorating UK-EU communications, with some of the previous data-sharing channels now closed off. “We don’t necessarily get the same alerts,” Jack concedes. The UK is no longer part of the Alert & Cooperation Network and its sub-division the EU Agri-Food Fraud Network, in which member states share information.

The UK isn’t entirely shut off, of course. It is part of international efforts to battle food fraud such as Operation Opson, a collaboration between Europol and Interpol to dismantle food fraud activity. The FSA also insists it maintains effective relationships with Europe.

Overall, though, leaving the EU has “achieved nothing positive in terms of protecting UK consumers from consuming unsafe food”, says Elliott. “Indeed, the lack of important information about food safety and fraud from European sources to the UK is a major negative.”

Another growing concern is the “wild west” that is online, he adds. “We’ve found a huge amount of food fraud online – they can basically sell whatever they want. That’s what we’re up against.”

Jack is similarly concerned about online, where labelling misrepresentation is “a big problem”. She highlights health supplements and weight-loss products. They often “lurk on that border of health, food and pharmacy”, with confusion on who should regulate what – which opens the door for fraudulent goods to circulate.

Online, the shopper is essentially “forced to do their own due diligence”, she says. Red flags include products that are seemingly under availability pressures suddenly being made available.

There isn’t one unique solution to all of these threats, but food fraud can be minimised by industry and government collaborating on a multi-pronged approach, says Kyriakides.

For instance, the FSA’s work is complemented by that of third-party assurance schemes, which are “integral” to the industry’s food safety management. They need to do a better job of reaching out to smaller businesses that are more vulnerable to criminals, he believes.

For Jack, technology will be crucial in making food fraud detection more affordable. Recently, FSA-backed scientists developed tests that use laser and DNA barcoding tech to detect fake honey products that are spiked with products like rice and sugar beet syrups. Still, there is more work to do here. “It’s not just about making the scientific tests easier – it’s also having computer systems that will do the vulnerability and risk assessments you need for BRC certificates”, Jack adds.

Meanwhile, the Chartered Trading Standards Institute has called on government to introduce a windfall tax on online marketplaces to fund safeguarding initiatives for shoppers. The group also backs new rules to make online marketplaces and other platforms responsible for the legal compliance of products sold by third parties on their sites.

As for calls by Elliott and others for a dedicated food minister, and implementation of a robust food security policy, the new Labour government appears to be open to ideas. In his new role as minister for food security and rural affairs, Daniel Zeichner has pledged to make “food security part of national security”.

For now, the FSA and its NFCU will focus their efforts on high-risk areas identified following last year’s meat processing scandal. A more comprehensive assessment of the food fraud threat and the NFCU’s priorities will be published “soon”, The Grocer understands, as well as the updated Retail Surveillance Survey.

There are also hopes that Miles’ move to Defra will push the government to prioritise the FSA’s needs – backed by a bigger budget not just for the agency, but also local authorities and border inspectors.

Kyriakides has one simple piece of advice for whoever takes the agency’s reins next: “It’s absolutely key they build trust between themselves and the industry, so we can work together on issues like this to root out bad practice and ensure consumers are getting the food they expect and food they can trust.”

Lessons learned from 2023’s major meat scandal

Following the meat fraud scandal of last year, the FSA has undergone a shake-up and “changed its approach” to what local authorities should be doing, says outgoing CEO Emily Miles.

It’s putting forward plans for supermarkets to take over responsibility for their own food hygiene inspections under the ‘Scores on the Doors’ ratings system, to help stretched local authorities focus on rogue retailers and other high-risk food crime threats instead.

“The fact is that even if you had all the officers in the world, if they’re basically going after compliant businesses that would be a waste of public money,” Miles points out.

National Food Crime Unit head Andrew Quinn says there has been a deliberate shift towards prevention in the wake of the scandal.

The crime unit now has an outreach team with dedicated prevention officers and relationship managers whose job is to engage with industry partners as well as work internally within other FSA departments to consider how to prevent food fraud from occurring in the first place.

The agency is “strengthening the role that third-party assurance schemes play in passing on information to regulators”, Miles says, with goals to work with a broader range of schemes beyond those that are FSA-approved.

The FSA previously admitted to placing too much emphasis on sharing data among the Food Industry Intelligence Network, whose membership counts fewer than 60 major food businesses – a stark minority compared with the many thousands of businesses in the wider UK food industry.

So in the post-scandal shake-up, the agency has pooled intelligence in a central unit that connects the NFCU with local authorities.

It also launched a single, confidential freephone line for whistleblowers and victims of food fraud. The new number for Food Crime Confidential is 0800 028 1180.