BLUE- SKY THINKING

SCIENCE IS AT THE FOREFRONT OF DETECTING AND PROSECUTING FOOD FRAUD

Sorting the beef from the bull

NEW ZEALAND PRIDES itself on producing some of the best milk, meat, wine and honey in the world. But Aotearoa’s reputation as a gold-standard exporter is coming under strain thanks to recent food fraud scandals.

In December last year, Peter Yealands, a celebrated winemaker, was prosecuted along with some staff at his former wine company for adding sugar to wine destined for the European Union. Winemakers sometimes sweeten wine to compensate for underripe grapes. But EU rules make it illegal to add sugar to wine in post-fermentation. Yealands and his colleagues knew this but went ahead, with staff covering up the fraud and falsifying winemaking records for about 3.8 million litres of wine bound for European shelves.

Thanks to a whistleblower, Yealands Estate Wines was fined $400,000 under the Wine Act, and Yealands himself received a $30,000 fine. The new company owners had nothing to do with the illegal activity.

In June, an Auckland honey producer was fined $260,000 for including synthetic chemicals in 14 tonnes of honey bound for the United States, China, Hong Kong and Korea. The producer, Evergreen Life, added synthetic compounds during the honey’s processing stage trying to pass it off as high-grade mānuka honey, which fetches a premium. Again, a whistleblower called time on the practice.

Also in June, the Egg Producers Federation developed a scheme to prevent caged eggs from being fobbed off as freerange or organic, which sell for $3 to $4 more per dozen. Producers signing up to the scheme are required to stamp a five-digit code on an egg’s shell. Two of the digits signify how they were produced — “FR” for free-range, “CG” for caged — while the other three digits identify the individual farm from which they came.

Consumers can go to tracemyegg. co.nz and learn where the eggs came from and the type of farming used. It’s a simple food-tracing system that will be backed up with annual and random checks on farmers, crucial to making the system more trustworthy than carton labeling. But it, too, comes in response to food fraud.

In 2017 the Newsroom website published an undercover investigation. It revealed

that millions of supposedly free-range eggs sold in Countdown stores were probably eggs from caged hens that the South Auckland supplier had sourced elsewhere. Last year, the Commerce Commission pressed charges against a West Auckland farmer for similar alleged offences.

New Zealand owes these whistleblowers a lot. The country’s international reputation is still recovering from the China melamine milk-powder scandal of a decade ago. Responsible producers are increasingly investing in science and technology to ensure the quality of their products, and to combat fakes and fraud as their goods travel through the supply chain.