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Food fraud risks rise as brands fight economic and environmental headwinds

Climate change, geopolitics, regulations, and demand for sustainable products are pushing up food fraud and adulteration risks, warns a world-leading food fraud expert.

There are 77 different herbs and spices sold in Europe, each coming from a complex supply chain and often grown in areas where regulation, surveillance and policing of these products is “not particularly good”, according to Professor Chris Elliott, from Thailand’s Thammasat University.

“Most of the products are heavily processed too,” he explained – for example, into powders – leaving plenty of room for fraud and adulteration.

Indeed, 2024 research published in the journal Foods using data from 33 years of health notifications recorded by the EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) showed that 25.6% related to fraud or adulteration, with most relating to composition (63%), the use of food additives and flavourings (13%), and adulteration fraud (13%).

Unauthorised synthetic dyes – Fast Garnet GBC, Orange II, and Sudan were found to be a particular problem – are added to intensify the colour of herbs and spices.

This topic is Elliott’s bread and butter. A former professor of food safety at Queen’s University Belfast, he is perhaps best known for his review into the integrity and assurance of food supply networks for the UK Government – research that followed the horsemeat scandal and made Elliott a household name for anyone in the global food chain.

Speaking to Ingredients Network in September, he warned how climate change and nature loss, geopolitics, regulations, and consumer demand – and willingness to pay – for more “sustainable products” are combining to drive prices up, which sucks more fraudsters into the supply chain and leaves food companies tempted to buy at lower prices that are too good to be true but keep costs down.

Spice shockwave

Elliott first raised the alarm over herbs and spices 10 years ago when research he published with the UK consumer magazine Which? showed that 25% of the oregano on sale in the nation had been adulterated in some shape or form.

This sent “shockwaves” across the world, Elliott wrote in 2020, as he revealed a second analysis that found just one sample had been adulterated.

Case closed? Not a chance, because he also tested sage: 25% of the samples were adulterated. Many had been “bulked out” with non-food materials like olive leaves, which, in some cases, accounted for as much as 58% of the sample.

Five years on, and Elliott is still “finding a lot of fraud” in the herbs and spices chain – in Europe and in Southeast Asia, where is currently working on several projects relating to food fraud, regulation and authenticity generally.

He has written about the huge scandal in Vietnam, in which thousands of tonnes of livestock-grade vegetable oil intended for livestock feed were found to have been repackaged and sold as edible cooking oil into the markets.

“The big fraud opportunity that had been identified by the criminals was the price difference between feed-grade and edible oil and realising they could sell the repackaged product at a 17% premium,” he wrote in one of his regular columns.

“They could also avoid paying VAT on what they had bought, as animal feed oil is tax-exempt.”

He told Ingredients Network that his work in the area is starting from a low base.

“We are trying to build awareness in the Mekong Delta area and we are starting to get buy-in, particularly in Thailand,” he explained.

Though authenticity testing has improved quite dramatically – testing can now be done in a matter of minutes rather than days – herbs and spices are among the products that “will always be really problematic”, he added.

But this is not the only food chain at risk. Food fraud costs the industry an estimated £25 billion to 30 billion annually, according to the US Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA).

From the dilution of olive oil to the substitution of seafood species, fraud can jeopardise food safety, erode customer trust, and wreak havoc on a business's reputation, noted the UK Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA).

In Europe, suspected fraudulent activities relating to food and feed increased in 2024, according to the annual report from the bloc’s Alert and Cooperation Network.

The findings, published in May, showed notifications to the RASFF and the Administrative Assistance and Cooperation networks that possibly resulted from “intentional behaviour” were up 21% and 24% respectively year on year.

The spice is right

This will come as no surprise to the likes of Elliott, who “still studies food fraud more than any other subject”. Just look at the price of coffee, he said, or cocoa – both commodities to have suffered from climate change and crop failures, and now regularly feature in articles about price rises in food and drink chains.

These are among the commodities also grappling with new regulations like the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), as well as age-old issues such as enforced child labour.

This is creating the perfect recipe for fraud, especially given that some businesses will be keen to keep prices low, and perhaps at any cost.

“When you’ve got soaring cost in supply chains and suddenly someone offers you something at 10% lower than the market price… we are just a little bit worried that a few too many will turn a blind eye regarding where it has actually come from,” he said.

Palm oil is another ingredient impacted by the EUDR – and another Elliott flags as a rising fraud issue. There are “huge amounts” of fraud in the chain, he explained.

“What we are finding is that palm oil is being diluted out with other types of oils, including industrial oils, and then red dyes, like sedan dyes, are being added to it to achieve the colour people expect,” he explained.

The current economic and environmental climate is fuelling food fraud, but that will drive the likes of Elliott to keep up and help catch them out.