Issue #58 | The Juice That's a Food Fraud Magnet | Vegetarian Cannibals Rejoice | ESG resources for food businesses | Greenhouse gases and food trade disruptions |
2022-10-03
Pomegranate Juice, a Food Fraud Magnet
What Happens To Greenhouse Gas Outputs During Wheat and Maize Trading Disruptions?
ESG Guidance and Checklists for Food Businesses
Just for fun: vegetarian cannibals rejoice
Food fraud incidents and horizon scanning updates from the past week
🎧 On the go? Paid subscribers can listen to an audio version any time, anywhere (find it at the bottom of this email) 🎧
Happy Monday.
Welcome to Issue #58 of The Rotten Apple, food safety and food fraud news for busy professionals. Plus an extra huge welcome and thank you for subscribing if you are new. It’s wonderful to have you here.
Today’s issue was inspired by a tasty fruit drink I enjoyed the other day during my travels. It was my first guaranteed-to-be-genuine pomegranate juice, squeezed straight from the fruit, right before my eyes. Usually, pomegranate juice is at high risk of being affected by food fraud, as you’ll learn in this email.
Also this week, we revisit the - perhaps controversial? - proposal to add ethical sustainable governance (ESG) checks to food safety audits. It looks like the standards owner IFS is going ahead with that idea; they have published guidance documents to assist food businesses to meet ESG requirements.
Plus, how do food commodity trading disruptions affect global greenhouse gas emissions? And what does human flesh taste like, if you make it plant-based?
Got feedback about this or anything else? Just reply to this email, I read every response.
Thanks for being part of our growing community,
Karen
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Pomegranate Juice - a Food Fraud Magnet
I couldn’t resist when I saw pomegranate juice for sale in a roadside stall the other day. I’m familiar with the fruit but have never had a chance to taste a guaranteed-to-be-genuine pomegranate juice. That’s because a high proportion of commercially available pomegranate juice is thought to be affected by fraudulent adulteration.
If you’ve ever purchased ‘pomegranate juice’ in a package there is a good chance it contained less pomegranate and more undeclared ingredients than it should have.
The juice I bought by the roadside was fragrant, cloudy and pink-coloured, with a delicate flavour that was somehow not overpowered by its lip-puckering astringency. The woman who prepared it cut the fruit in half and placed each half in turn into a metal cup-shaped press with a lever handle. As she pulled the lever, the skin split, the fleshy ‘jewels’ inside - properly called arils - burst and the pomegranate juice ran immediately through a small metal spout straight into my waiting cup, accompanied by a few stray pieces of white pith. It was delicious.
Pomegranate juice is frequently affected by food fraud, with the American Botanical Council citing evidence from several surveys of juices and extracts with high failure rates in authenticity testing.
The addition of undeclared water, sweetened water or other fruit juices are the main forms of food fraud in pomegranate juice, according to the Council’s 2021 bulletin on pomegranate product adulteration. Undeclared colourants, including anthocyanins and grape juice, are sometimes added to diluted or adulterated juice to maintain the colour of the adulterated juice.
The adulterants - fruit juices, colourants, sugar and water - are easily available and are of a significantly lower cost than pure pomegranate juice which can be difficult to obtain when crops are affected by extreme drought or cold snaps in growing areas. This makes pomegranate juice fraud both profitable and easy to perpetrate.
Pomegranate extracts, which are sold as dietary supplements, have a history of being fraudulently adulterated by spiking with extra ellagic acid or other polyphenolic compounds. This is done to artificially increase the active compounds in the extracts, to boost their apparent effectiveness, using sources that are cheaper than pomegranate fruit.
The Botanical Council also describes pomegranate products that are “made mostly from unknown or unidentified lower-cost source materials, with little-to-no pomegranate constituents”.
To protect yourself from pomegranate juice fraud, the best way is to watch it being crushed just before you drink it. For food businesses that purchase pomegranate products, establishing a robust product specification that includes physical limits for markers of authenticity, validated by analytical testing should help to mitigate the risk.
Source: https://www.herbalgram.org/news/press-releases/2021/bapp-bulletin-adulteration-pomegranate-products/
What Happens To Greenhouse Gas Outputs During Wheat and Maize Trading Disruptions?
Researchers have modelled changes in greenhouse gas emissions due to the halt in wheat and maize exports from Ukraine and Russia (which have now partially resumed).
They postulated that production and exports of wheat and maize will increase in other regions, but that overall food insecurity will not improve due to that increase. The models also show worse greenhouse gas outcomes, in part due to an increase in the production of maize in Brazil, which will adversely affect soil biomass and carbon stocks. Modelling also captured changing patterns in biofuel production and use.
🍏 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00600-0 🍏
ESG Guidance and Checklists for Food Businesses
The food safety standards owner IFS is proposing to include ethical and sustainable governance (ESG) policy requirements in the next version of its standard. I’m not sure how I feel about extra requirements like this being added to food safety standards, and discussed this in Issue #38…
“Do sustainability policies have a place in food safety standards? The certification scheme owner IFS certainly thinks so. The next version of their Food Standard is proposed to include a sustainability requirement.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. While sustainable food manufacturing is super-important for the future of our species, I just don’t know if adding requirements to certification standards is the way to achieve it. It feels like the standards writer is venturing beyond the current boundaries of food safety and quality. It feels like scope-creep.
Food safety standards have been getting longer and more difficult and more prescriptive year on year. Adding an element that does not directly impact an individual company’s food safety or food quality outcomes just seems… unhelpful.
On the other hand, IFS is an organisation that represents retailers’ interests. If they want to add sustainability to their standard they can. The justification would be that without a sustainable food system, food safety is harder to achieve at a global level. True! Sustainability-supporting activities are absolutely necessary, but I think most food safety specialists would assert that they don’t belong in a food safety audit.”
Guidance is now available
IFS has published a guideline and checklists for food businesses. They were developed for businesses certified to IFS standards but can be used by any food business. Get them at the link below.
As a bonus, IFS-certified companies are also being offered free ESG training too!
Like previously published IFS guidance documents, this one is very good, with clear language and sensible advice. If your company is considering building an ESG program, this would be a great place to start.
Get them here:
🍏 https://www.ifs-certification.com/index.php/en/standards/4275-ifs-esg-check 🍏
Food Safety News and Free Resources
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Just for Fun
Vegetarian Cannibals Rejoice, Plant-based Human Meat is Here!
What do you do when you have a taste for human flesh but prefer a plant-based diet? Reach out to Oumph!, a plant-based meat manufacturer. Oumph created vegetarian human-flesh burgers from mushroom, soy and wheat protein and launched them in Stockholm last Halloween. Yumm-eeee. 😬
Hear the product developer explain how he formulated the burgers in this short video.
Below for paying subscribers: food fraud updates including plastic eggs in the news again, a butter warning and more, plus 🎧 an audio version of this email 🎧, read aloud by me.
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