Defining the Public Health Threat of Food Fraud

Abstract

Food fraud, including the more defined subcategory of economically motivated adulteration, is a food risk that is gaining recognition and concern. Regardless of the cause of the food risk, adulteration of food is both an industry and a government responsibility. Food safety, food fraud, and food defense incidents can create adulteration of food with public health threats. Food fraud is an intentional act for economic gain, whereas a food safety incident is an unintentional act with unintentional harm, and a food defense incident is an intentional act with intentional harm. Economically motivated adulteration may be just that-economically motivated-but the food-related public health risks are often more risky than traditional food safety threats because the contaminants are unconventional. Current intervention systems are not designed to look for a near infinite number of potential contaminants. The authors developed the core concepts reported here following comprehensive research of articles and reports, expert elicitation, and an extensive peer review. The intent of this research paper is to provide a base reference document for defining food fraud-it focuses specifically on the public health threat-and to facilitate a shift in focus from intervention to prevention. This will subsequently provide a framework for future quantitative or innovative research. The fraud opportunity is deconstructed using the criminology and behavioral science applications of the crime triangle and the chemistry of the crime. The research provides a food risk matrix and identifies food fraud incident types. This project provides a starting point for future food science, food safety, and food defense research.

In pursuit of food system integrity: the situational prevention of food fraud enterprise

“…Spink and Moyer (2011) delineate different types of food fraud: adulteration, tampering, over-run, theft, diversion, simulation and counterfeit. Similarly, Bouzembrak and Marvin's (2016) analysis of notifications data collated through the EU's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) in the period 2000-2013 established six different fraud types: (i) improper, fraudulent, missing or absent health certificates, (ii) illegal importation, (iii) tampering, (iv) improper, expired, fraudulent or missing common entry documents or import declarations, (v) expiration date and (vi) mislabelling.…”

Critiquing the Inter-Disciplinary Literature on Food Fraud

“…Food fraudsters are clandestine, stealthy, and actively seek to avoid detection (Spink 2011) being economically motivated to cheat the consumer. There are a number of ways that food fraud can occur (Spink and Moyer 2011b) including the product being stolen; sold in alternative markets; having fraudulent packaging; an illegitimate product being passed of as legitimate; and counterfeiting. Detecting such offences is difficult and time consuming and relies on good quality intelligence from the industry and general public.…”

Food scares: a comprehensive categorisation

“…This is not to suggest that this is a new form of food scare: as noted in Section 1, cases of this type date back at least to the times of King John I of England when bread was adulterated with alternative food and non-food stuffs. However, as food production becomes increasingly economically driven, short cuts to save money are increasing (Spink and Moyer, 2011 …”