Food fraud: how fake meat, milk, tea and olive oil makes it into your kitchen

Five years on from the horsemeat scandal, a quarter of shoppers are still being duped and the problem could get even worse after Brexit.

Did you know that 27% of British consumers say they have experienced food fraud? It came as a surprise to me because I had never even heard the expression until I read that stat.

The number comes from the Food Fraud Report 2018, carried out by NFU Mutual and shows this crime could be costing the food and drink industry in the UK up to £12 billion each year.

Probably the biggest, most shocking and publicly known instance of food fraud was back in 2013.

Irish food inspectors revealed they had found horsemeat in frozen burgers that were being advertised and sold as beef. The scandal was enormous and seriously damaged public trust in food, yet few of us called it fraud.

Food fraud is a little-discussed crime that continues to have a potentially vast impact on a key industry. The NFU's survey showed that more than a quarter of consumers have experienced food fraud, while more than a third of people say they are less trusting of products and retailers than they were five years ago.

What’s more, a third of the consumers polled by the insurer said they expect that food crime will increase in the future, as of Brexit and of the economic and global uncertainty.

So what exactly counts as food fraud and how can we stay safe?

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Fraud in your fridge

New Food magazine defines food fraud as when products are deliberately diluted, mislabelled or misrepresented, tampered with or substituted with another product.

Its research has shown that some of the most frequently fraudulent foods are olive oil, milk, honey, saffron, orange juice, coffee, apple juice, tea, fish and pepper.

The reasons aren’t just because the supplier wants to substitute a cheaper alternative, sometimes they are because the demand for a product is greater than supply and so the product is diluted or replaced entirely with something else.

It’s an upsetting idea for shoppers who need to believe they can trust the labels on the products they buy.

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Didn’t the horse meat scandal fix all this?

After the scandal of 2013, many supermarkets promised to improve scrutiny of their supply chains, to ensure that this kind of mislabelling could not happen again.

Yet just last month the BBC reported that more than a fifth of the meat samples tested by the Food Standards Agency last year were shown to be partly or wholly made up of meat that was not on the label.

The Freedom of Information request made by the BBC revealed that in total 73 of the contaminated samples came from retailers - including three supermarkets. 50 came from restaurants and 22 from food processing plants.

Some of the samples contained DNA from as many as four different animals, while some contained no trace of the meat they were labelled as.

That doesn’t mean it was as shocking as the horse meat scandal. The most common contaminant was cow, while pig and chicken were the next most common unlabelled additions and substitutes.

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There’s a cost to us all

Food fraud carries a cost and it’s more than just the 'ick' factor of not knowing what’s actually on your plate.

The latest analysis of the individual figures was carried out four years ago but it showed that customers effectively pay a 5p in the pound fraud ‘tax’ on their groceries.

PKF Littlejohn and the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies at the University of Portsmouth carried out the research, that showed that if food fraud was eliminated then the price of groceries could be reduced by 5p on a loaf of bread, 11p on six eggs, 16p on a pint of beer and 28p on a bottle of wine.

Co-author of the report Jim Gee, head of forensic and counter fraud services for PKF Littlejohn, estimated then that food and drink fraud could be costing households an average of £424 a year.

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Set to get worse

Food fraud has not yet caused any significant problems for people but there are other issues.

Professor Lisa Jack, the other co-author of the report and chair of the Food Fraud Group at the University of Portsmouth, said: “Food fraud is always financially motivated.  On the whole, food fraud does not harm public health.  It's more that consumers and food businesses are not always getting what they pay for.

“Margins are so tight in the food sector that almost any food can be misrepresented to get a bit of profit for a fraudster.”

Sian Edmunds, a partner at independent UK law firm Burges Salmon, has expressed concern that the falling value of the pound since the Brexit vote has already hurt food importers, making fraud more likely, and that a 'no deal' scenario could be even worse.

She said: “As the UK imports 29% of its food and drink from the EU, the impact on prices could be significant. Where there are price hikes there is always an opportunity for criminals to make money by substituting higher cost items for a lower cost equivalent.

“Equally, however, price rises can lead to circumstances where legitimate businesses which are struggling to meet increased costs decide to substitute higher cost ingredients for lower cost ones without declaring the change. A recent extreme example of this resulted in the death of a consumer from anaphylactic shock due to the inclusion of undeclared allergens in a curry."

Another potentially-dangerous tactic is to relabel products with revised sell-by dates, Edmunds adds.

Food fraud is an issue and it’s an issue that has the potential to get a lot worse. Customers need to start asking what their regular supermarkets and restaurants are doing to make sure that what’s on their plate is what they expect.