Global Learnings from the Food Crime Strategic Assessment Report 2024

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I’m a big fan of the work done by the United Kingdom’s National Food Crime Unit (NFCU) and Food Standards Scotland’s Scottish Food Crime and Incidents Unit (SFCIU), which are relatively new agencies formed in response to the large-scale horsemeat scandal which heavily impacted the United Kingdom’s food system in 2013.

They also write a good report! Last week they published Food Crime Strategic Assessment 2024¹, to communicate food crime trends and explain how the agencies’ understanding of food crime threats has changed over the past year.  

The report contains valuable information for food professionals in other global regions, as well as the United Kingdom. In this post I summarise the notable observations and trends in the report, adding insights for readers from other parts of the world.

Contents

• How the food crime landscape has changed since 2020

• Commodity-specific threats (UK and global)

• Claim-related threats (UK and global)

• Organised crime in food fraud

• Novel frauds (2024)