Laura Brehaut

The scale was staggering: more than 300,000 babies sickened and 54,000 hospitalized. Kidney damage claimed six young lives. Upwards of 80 per cent of the victims were just two years old or younger.

The culprit? Tainted milk. The victims of the 2008 Chinese milk scandal didn’t fall prey to inadvertent contamination but rather deliberate deception for profit. In total, 22 companies were implicated in adulterating milk powder in China, including infant formula, with melamine. Used in industrial plastics, flooring and countertops, melamine is the toxin of choice when it comes to inexpensively bumping up the protein concentration of diluted dairy products.

A decade later, the suffering continues as many of the affected children still contend with kidney dialysis and surgeries. Today, roughly nine in 10 Chinese consumers buy organic infant formula. The wrongdoing has instilled a deep distrust of not just locally produced milk powder, but also the integrity of food safeguards as a whole.

This is the power of food fraud: the addition, adulteration, misrepresentation or substitution of food for profit compromises health and rocks faith in supply systems. It puts an estimated US$30 to $40 billion each year in the hands of scammers instead of reputable producers. It cheats consumers and damages brand reputations. And although there are systems in place to ensure our food is safe to eat, all too often it feels as though the onus is placed on consumers to safely navigate grocery store aisles.

“We’ve all been victims of food fraud, whether we realize it or not,” says Sylvain Charlebois, professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. “There are two layers to the food fraud problem. One is the socio-economics of food, basically seeing many companies selling food at a lower price. And secondly, public health: (if you) buy a product and in that product there are (unlisted) ingredients you’re allergic to… that’s a problem. Food fraud could kill people.”

Food supply systems are exceedingly complex, and as such, rife with opportunities for fraud to flourish. Consider one of the most mundane fast-food menu items: the cheeseburger. Every continent on the planet, with the exception of Antarctica, has a hand in putting together the seemingly simple sandwich. Comprised of more than 50 components, the number of countries involved in its production is staggering; it takes ingredients from 14 different nations just to make a vinegar for the burger’s sauce.

Deception could happen at any point in this interdependent system with each country involved having different regulations and standards. It’s the multifaceted structure of the global food supply chain that allows fraud to occur, and the fact that it’s clouded from view makes it extremely difficult to monitor. What isn’t difficult to detect is the motivation. According to a Michigan State University study, which was published in the January 2017 issue of Food Control, a single shipment of falsified food can mean tens of thousands of dollars in illicit profit.

For as long as cheats have been in action — tinting vegetables with copper in the 19th century or diluting milk with chalk or plaster in the Middle Ages — the list of vulnerable products has grown equally exhaustive. From horsemeat masquerading as beef in what The Guardian called “the biggest food fraud of the 21st century” to escolar (a.k.a. “Ex-Lax fish”) commonly standing in for butterfish and white tuna, and paprika and chili powders contaminated with prohibited Sudan dye to enhance their red colour, fraudulent food practices have been honed over millennia.

“When we started to look and track how far back we could find evidence of food fraud, we got back about 2,000 years and then we thought, that’s probably far enough to say as long as food has been consumed, somebody has tried to cheat it,” says Chris Elliott, professor of food safety at Queen’s University Belfast.

The potential for fraud lies in every single food on the market.

As much a public health concern as a consumer protection issue, food fraud has affected all of us. So, why do we continue to risk potentially tragic consequences with a laissez-faire approach to the problem?

FIGURING OUT WHEN OR WHEREFRAUD OCCURRED IS IMPOSSIBLE.

To illustrate this point, Elliott plays a game with his students: they name a food and if he can’t counter with an associated fraud within 15 seconds, they’re rewarded with no coursework for the entire semester. He’s never been beaten.

When he’s not educating students on the pervasiveness of food fraud, Elliott conducts large-scale international research into better ways of both detecting and deterring it. Driven by the remarkable ingenuity of fraudsters, he and his team of analytical scientists are in a constant game of cat and mouse. He founded the Institute for Global Food Security as an attempt to get one step ahead. It’s here that researchers perform predictive analytics to identify the major threats in food and beverage safety. Elliott brings up the 2013 European horsemeat scandal — into which he led the U.K. government’s independent inquiry — and uses Tesco as an example of how food fraud can occur. The multinational retailer purchases 9,000 different ingredients, he says. How does it determine which of the thousands are most vulnerable to fraud?

In narrowing down the search, Elliott and his team examine at what point fraud is most likely to happen: is a particular ingredient easy or onerous to adulterate? They also look at factors such as crop failures around the world, commodities experiencing deviations in supply and demand, and the complexity of supply chains, all of which drive fakery. Herbs and spices, for example, are extremely high-value commodities with convoluted supply chains. Saffron is more expensive by weight than gold; vanilla is more valuable than silver. For the enterprising scammer, the sector is ripe for a swindle.

“We’ve come up with our own formula, our own algorithms and from that we can predict what the top five or 10 food commodities or food ingredients are to fraud. And we distribute that to some of the companies that we work with and that allows them to focus and target their resources on their biggest vulnerabilities,” he says.

The extent of the issue hit home recently with an Oceana Canada report, which revealed just how widespread seafood fraud is in this country. The advocacy group conducted DNA testing on nearly 400 seafood specimens from roughly 200 restaurants and food retailers in five Canadian cities (Victoria, Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax). Almost half of the seafood was mislabelled. Oceana Canada found cheaper species, such as haddock ($39.88 per kg) being substituted for more expensive halibut ($74.77 per kg) and Atlantic salmon ($37.66 per kg) passed off as sockeye ($101.69 per kg). But beyond the literal and figurative bait and switch, seafood fraud poses a food safety issue and puts pressure on already threatened or endangered species.

More than half of the substituted fish species “could have potential health consequences for consumers,” Oceana Canada said. For example, the aforementioned escolar, “laxative of the sea,” can cause serious gastrointestinal distress. All of the Canadian samples labelled butterfish and 10 of the 15 white tuna specimens were actually escolar.

With anywhere from five to seven steps in the supply chain, which is “significantly longer than any other type of food,” says Julia Levin, Oceana Canada’s chief seafood fraud campaigner, seafood is an excellent example of the lack of transparency that exists in food systems. Without full chain traceability, figuring out where or when the fraud occurred, and who should be held responsible, is an arduous (if not impossible) task. “There are some studies that have been done and they have found it at every stage of the supply chain,” adds Levin. “Obviously we see more mislabelling once the fish has been processed. If it’s a whole fish, it has its morphological features: it has its skin; it has its fins. So if you recognize fish, if you work with fish, you can identify the species by looking at it. But once it becomes a fillet or once the skin is taken off, it becomes a whole lot easier to mislabel it.”

Levin’s explanation reveals an inconvenient truth when it comes to food fraud: it can be highly