The food in your kitchen cabinets might not be what it seems.
“I guarantee that every time a product can be presented as something costlier, it will. It’s so simple as that,” Larry Olmsted, writer of Real Food/Fake Food, told CNBC.
Economically motivated fraudsters secretly infiltrate the worldwide grocery store in a wide range of ways, including counterfeits, dilutions, substitutes and mislabeling.
This not only hurts consumers’ wallets, but additionally threatens public health and safety.
By some estimates, food fraud affects at the very least 1% of the worldwide food industry and costs as much as $40 billion a yr, in keeping with the Food and Drug Administration.
“We may not know the general impact of food fraud because a whole lot of what scammers do is hidden from us and has been for hundreds of years.” Kristie Laurvick, senior food program manager on the US Pharmacopeial Convention, told CNBC.
Even the FDA says it can’t estimate how often this fraud occurs or what its economic impact is.
“Watch out with the products you put in, on yourself or plug into the wall,” John Spink, director of the Food Fraud Prevention Think Tank, told CNBC.
Between 2012 and 2021, probably the most common form of food fraud was lying concerning the origin of the animal and dilution or substitution, each of which accounted for 16% of recorded incidents in keeping with the Food Chain ID Monitoring Food Safety.
For instance, dilution may involve adding a less expensive vegetable oil to an expensive extra virgin olive oil.
“If I drink scotch, I can’t tell you [the] the difference between a $50 bottle and a $5,000 bottle. So I do know I could have been cheated at that time,” Spink said.
The Food Fraud Prevention Think Tank suggests five questions consumers can ask themselves to cut back their vulnerability to product fraud.
- What form of product is it? Be especially careful with any product you apply to your body, swallow, or plug right into a wall.
- Can you spot the difference between the products?
- Do you know the vendor or supplier? Do you trust them?
- Do you shop online? If that’s the case, did you find an internet supplier from a reliable source?
- To complain. Is the supplier legal? If that’s the case, they’ll need to know.
Watch the video above to learn more about the differing types of fraud within the food industry, how the industry prevents risk, what consumers can do and where scams can lurk within the olive oil, spice and seafood markets.