Issue #8 2021-10-04
Issue #8 2021-10-04
Cocaine or olive oil, you choose... Plus, pesticides in organic food, allergen-risk-reduction and progress with traceability
New labelling rules to prevent allergen deaths
Food fraud: better than cocaine?
Leaps and bounds for traceability in the USA
Did someone say ‘pestcides’? (Fans of organic shouldn’t panic, but…..)
Food fraud incidents and horizon scanning updates from the past week
Hi,
Welcome to Issue 8 of The Rotten Apple, a weekly newsletter for professionals, policy-makers and purveyors.
The family of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died from an allergic reaction after eating an inadequately labelled baguette campaigned tirelessly to save other families from the same horror. Read about what they achieved, and how your food business can prevent such tragedies, in this week’s issue.
Also this week: drugs, money and fraud in the international food supply chain. Plus, non-approved pesticides in organic produce. Also, read about how a new(ish) leader with industry experience is using his supply chain expertise to improve traceability in the USA.
As always, this issue ends with a list of food fraud incidents and food fraud horizon scanning news from the past week.
Thanks for reading!
Karen
P.S. If you know someone who’d enjoy this newsletter, please share it with them.
Food Safety
Great news for food allergy sufferers (BTW, are you labelling correctly?)
Last week saw the introduction of Natasha’s Law in the United Kingdom. The law is named after a teenager who died from a fatal allergic reaction to sesame which was in a baguette she purchased from a food outlet. The baguette was pre-packaged, but the package carried no allergen information.
The new law requires all businesses in England to clearly label all foods packaged and produced on their premises with a complete list of ingredients.
The United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency have advised enforcement authorities to take a supportive approach and to help food businesses if they find minor errors with new labels in the early months, “except where circumstances require immediate action”.
If you have a food business that prepares and packs food for sale on the premises, be sure to check out the guidance below. Even if you are not in the UK, labelling your packaged food with all ingredients and complete allergen information is strongly recommended, and, in many countries is already required by law.
In short: 🍏 Accurate and complete labelling of packaged foods made on site, like salads and sandwiches, is vital to prevent deaths of allergic people 🍏 A new law for such labels was introduced in the UK last week 🍏 If it’s not the law in your country you should be doing it anyway 🍏 The UK Food Standards Agency has released guidance for food businesses 🍏
Press release: https://www.food.gov.uk/news-alerts/news/millions-with-food-allergies-to-benefit-as-new-allergen-labelling-law-comes-into-force
Guidance for food businesses: https://www.food.gov.uk/allergen-labelling-changes-for-prepacked-for-direct-sale-ppds-food
P.S. It's so easy to get this stuff wrong! There's a massive pizza recall underway in USA because Nestle packed soy-containing Three Meat Pizza into Pepperoni Pizza boxes. As a result, the pizzas didn't have the correct allergen information.
That’s a multimillion dollar mistake!
Food Fraud
Why olive oil is better than cocaine
Organised crime in food: scary! But not new. In fact, it’s widely believed that the Italian mafia owe their existence to the early days of the Sicilian lemon export industry.
More recently, members of the Italian Piromalli clan, which is alleged to be ‘Calabrian mafia’, were arrested in 2017 for operating businesses that exported large quantities of fake olive oil to the United States. They were charged with commercial fraud crimes and with being members of mafia-type criminal networks.
When consumers think ‘organised crime’ they usually imagine drugs and guns, not food. But food crimes are said to be extremely appealing to criminals because the penalties are typically much less severe than for other crimes. It’s also been said that compared to smuggling cocaine, the profit margin from making and selling fraudulent olive oil is three times better (sources – as always – can be found below).
A 2021 French documentary “Food Fraud: An Organised Crime” recently explored this topic for consumers. With interesting insights into specific frauds with olive oil, fish trading and the European meat supply chain, it’s definitely worth a watch. It aired in Australia on 20th September and can be viewed on abc.net.au/4corners.
In short: 🍏 Organised crime has been implicated in food fraud for decades 🍏 That is now being more widely recognised 🍏 A new documentary showcases some of the issues for consumers 🍏 Awareness and enforcement of this aspect of food fraud is increasing (good!) 🍏
Find the trailer here: https://javafilms.fr/film/food-fraud/
Sources:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-021-09975-w
https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/italy-arrests-33-accused-olive-oil-fraud/55364
Food Safety
Farm to fork traceability: hard to do, but progress is being made
One of the top dogs at US FDA, Frank Yiannas, is a guy who spent many years working with international food supply chains at Walmart. For big food companies like Walmart, traceability is a big deal. So, it’s safe to safe that Yiannas knows a thing or two about traceability.
When things go wrong in food, it is imperative to find all the affected product and recall it swiftly from the marketplace. To do that the food needs to be traceable…. easily traceable. Slow recalls mean that more consumers get sick - or die - from a foodborne illness outbreak. Fast recalls mean less illnesses and less damage to brands and reputations. Precise recalls mean that only the products that truly present a risk to consumers need to be recalled, instead of all foods of the affected type.
When Yiannas arrived at the FDA, he brought with him a keen awareness of the need to improve traceability in the US food supply. Specifically, traceability needs to be accurate, precise and fast.
Traceability in many foods is patchy across the globe. Seafood, fresh fruit and veg are particularly challenging to trace because of the way they are harvested and distributed.
A lack of adequate traceability in romaine lettuce in 2018 led to the entire industry being penalised, after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urged Americans to avoid eating “all romaine from anywhere” after a food-borne illness outbreak. At the time of the notification, the CDC was unable to locate the precise source of the contaminated lettuce and said they believed it lettuce was “grown or processed in Canada or the United States”.
Millions of dollars’ worth of lettuce was dumped, including thousands of tonnes of perfectly safe, uncontaminated produce, simply because the produce wasn’t fully traceable. Something had to be done.
Last year, the FDA proposed a new rule that will standardise traceability recordkeeping in US food production for high risk foods including fresh leafy greens, sprouts, cut fruits, nut butters, seafood and soft cheeses.
At the time the rules were proposed, the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy and Response, Frank Yiannas, said “we lack a harmonised system of traceability from farm to fork that is universally understood and utilised.”
“This means that during an outbreak investigation, our ability to rapidly track and trace specific food products through the supply chain is often impeded by a lack of data.”
Precise recalls require good traceability, all the way from the farm to the fork. Fast recalls are easier with digital technologies. The proposed standardisation is expected to pave the way for digital solutions for traceability. These should contribute to more precise traceability and faster recalls in the event of a problem.
This month, the FDA announced the winners of a competition it established to encourage companies to develop no-cost or low-cost digital track and trace systems for food supply chains. The winners range from free downloadable software that runs on Microsoft Excel to proprietary blockchain technology solutions.
If the new rule is finalized, the implementation period will be at least 2 years, so full traceability is a long way off in the USA. But the technology is here now, and it no longer costs a fortune.
If you are looking for traceability solutions, as a small to medium enterprise, check out the winners of the FDA competition (links below); they might have a solution that would be perfect for you.
In short: 🍏 Traceability needs to be accurate and fast to protect consumers and industry 🍏 Traceability is difficult 🍏 The US FDA has proposed a rule that is designed to support digital traceability solutions by standardardising recordkeeping 🍏 New solutions for small to medium enterprises have been created and the low and no-cost versions have been promoted through a FDA competition 🍏
Sources and more information:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/health/romaine-ecoli-outbreak-cdc.html
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-safety-modernization-act-fsma/fsma-proposed-rule-food-traceability
Food Fraud
Pesticides in organic food (don’t panic???)
Last month I dusted off my dusty Microsoft Access skills (ugh, Microsoft Access!) and dug into the recently released pesticide survey data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The USDA surveys their nation’s food supply every year, checking for residues of pesticides and environmental contaminants. The most recent results are for food sampled in 2019. Overall, the results are very good, in that more than 98 percent of the tested foods (mostly fruit and veg) had no or acceptable/safe levels of pesticide residues. This information is readily available in the report in the official survey results.
Organic food results are not included in the USDA’s official report. This isn’t a criticism of the USDA; their pesticide program is not designed to directly monitor organic foods. However, they do keep a record of which foods in the survey were marketed as ‘organic’ at the time of sampling.
I thought I would take a look myself. So I downloaded the raw data from the USDA website to find out how the organic products in the survey fared…
Are US organic products as squeaky-clean as one would hope?
Not exactly. The overwhelming majority (74%) of ‘organic’ samples had no residues at all, which is fantastic. Around one quarter had some residues, which is to be expected, given that the test methods are able to pick up tiny amounts of residues.
So far so good.
More concerningly, 9 percent of ‘organic’ foods had unsafe* levels of at least one pesticide. Note that did not include the only major organic-approved pesticide in this year’s survey Spinosad/Spinosad A, which was, when detected, always present at acceptable levels.
A properly controlled organic supply chain should not result in products that contain non-approved pesticides at unsafe levels. Which leads me to conclude that there was food fraud occurring somewhere along the supply chain for those 9 percent. Disappointing!
*unsafe levels = residues exceeding the tolerance set by the EPA or residues that have no safe tolerance. Tolerance = ‘the maximum amount of a pesticide allowed to remain in or on a food’.
In short: 🍏 Most organic food in the 2019 USDA pesticide residue testing program had no pesticide residues 🍏 A small but significant proportion of organic foods had pesticides at ‘unsafe’ levels, and these were not organic-approved pesticides 🍏 Food fraud probably occurred somewhere along the supply chain of those foods 🍏
Read more, including a comparison with 2014 results:
https://foodfraudadvisors.com/pesticide-residues-organic-food-2021/
https://www.ams.usda.gov/datasets/pdp
Food Fraud Incidents and Horizon Scanning
Food fraud incidents added to Food Fraud Risk Information Database in the past week
Spanish authorities have found problematic molluscs during inspections carried out as part of ongoing investigations into illegal bivalve mollusc harvesting and handling. The products had problematic paperwork or were not being purified/depurated properly or at all - Spain (Note that this report does not give dates for the seizures and they could have been part of the already-reported Operation Opson X activities.)
The former head of a school food program has been arrested on food crime charges. He is alleged to have acted corruptly by accepting bribes for food supply contracts, entering contracts with food company(s) in which he owned a stake and it is also alleged that the contracts were for higher than market prices and resulted in the procurement of 'substandard' food - USA https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/former-top-nyc-school-official-charged-with-corruption-in-alleged-bribery-scheme/3298720/
Authorities have cautioned a dairy for producing paneer containing fat from non-milk sources - India https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/patiala/food-adulteration-two-more-paneer-samples-fail-test-317174
Food fraud horizon scanning (other updates to the Food Fraud Risk Information Database in the past week)
Coffee
Australian importers are warning that the affects of Brazilian harvest problems and supply chains issues from the Covid-19 pandemic are hitting premium coffee suppliers hard. They are predicting shortages and unusually high prices for three years. This mirrors all international markets, which are being similarly affected by the soaring price of coffee beans. Higher prices can increase the risk of food fraud. Possible frauds include false claims about the provenance, origin, ethical, fair-trade, sustainable and organic status of coffee. Lower quality, old beans from long term storage may be mixed with fresh beans. Undeclared blending of robusta into arabica is also possible. 30/09/2021
If you are new…
If you are new to The Rotten Apple, don’t forget you can check out past issues on the website. Last month I wrote about scandals and intrigue in a plant-based burger brand (Issue #4), Subway’s tuna sandwich battles (Issue #5), and a company that claims to be making cultured meat from human DNA (Issue #4).