The economic impact of counterfeiting products in the food and beverage industry amounts to millions in lost sales and profits to retailers, producers, and suppliers. Fake claims about the content of foods and beverages also pose an unsuspected risk to consumer health, as well as to people who base their food choices on their ethical and religious convictions.
Consequences
Consumers make their purchases in good faith, putting their confidence in the honesty and integrity of the supply chain. Counterfeiting is at odds with this reasonable assumption that a product is all that it claims to be on its labeling. Coinciding with the financial losses facing businesses on the production and supply side, the consequences to consumers can range from simply being deceived about the product’s content, or not benefitting from the anticipated efficacy of the product, to the more severe outcomes, including illness and death.
The world was made aware of this danger in 2008, when six babies died and 300,000 babies fell ill after drinking melamine-tainted milk products in China. Another major food scandal broke in Europe in 2013, when it was revealed that horse meat was being labeled as beef from cattle. Although horse meat is suitable for human consumption, the public health issue relates to the type of tests conducted to prove the suitability of the beef for human consumption. Since these tests differ from those applied to horse meat, applying the wrong tests to the sample could create an opportunity for hazardous substances, such as residual chemicals from veterinary medicines, to enter the food supply chain.
Food and beverage counterfeiting syndicates are motivated by greed and driven by the attraction of increased sales margins. Sometimes a reluctance to discard products that have passed their sell-by date leads to re-labeling and, in the case of exported products, there is an objective to bypass or reduce Customs and Excise duties on certain premium products.
Commonly Counterfeited Products
Despite the best efforts of national food safety authorities such as the U.S. FDA and the European Food Safety Authority, certain food and beverage product types continue to fall prey to counterfeiting. Notable examples include olive oil, goat’s milk, wines, basmati rice, honey, caviar, vanilla, and saffron.
Olive oil is product that is produced to different standards by varying methods of production, and its quality is also determined by the free acidity of the soil. The production and sell-by dates are also important because olive oil eventually oxidizes and becomes rancid. Since each of these factors determine the value of the end product, falsifying any of this information amounts to counterfeiting. In a similar vein, a variety of aromatic basmati rice types are sold at premium prices on the world market, and the increasing value consumers are placing on this product also makes it a prime target for counterfeiters who adulterate the product with the addition of cheaper types of long grain rice. The average consumer, recognizing the distinct aroma of the basmati rice, would probably not notice the presence of the other type of long grain rice.
Goat’s milk can be diluted with cow’s milk and the difference is very difficult to detect by taste alone. Honey can be counterfeited in various different ways. It can be adulterated with sugar, corn syrup, and other sweeteners, or the type of honey is misrepresented by a fake declaration of botanical or geographical origin to attract a higher price on the market. For example, Manuka honey is broadly hailed as a wonder product that demonstrates antiviral and antibacterial qualities. Not as sweet as normal honey, it is made by bees gathering nectar from the delicate flowers of the Manuka bush, native to New Zealand. When this rare and highly priced product is misrepresented, consumers are not only duped financially, but are also cheated of the health benefits associated with it. Caviar is another rare and expensive product that black market dealers substitute with the roe of other fish, passing it off as the roe of the sturgeon harvested only in the waters off Russia and Iran.
Expensive spices like saffron and vanilla are also frequently faked by being synthetically produced or by being substituted with cheaper spices that taste and look the same thanks to food flavoring and dyes. Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice, originating from a relatively rare crocus flower that tends to produce only about four blossoms in its lifetime. It is often counterfeited with other harmless plants, such as calendula or even dried onion that has been dyed orange. Saffron and vanilla are grown in many countries where a cash crop is sorely needed and one of the consequences of counterfeiting is to rob such communities of a percentage of their livelihood.
Wines and brandies also lend themselves to counterfeiting through false information on the labeling, particularly since certain vintages attract far higher prices than others. Counterfeiting in this realm includes adulterating these liquors with the addition of cheaper products such as fruit juices, and sometimes with the addition of harmful chemicals and sweeteners to compensate for color or flavor.
Over and above the issues of public health, fraud, and tax evasion, counterfeiting of food impacts the spheres of ethics and religion. Many consumers choose to avoid foods that contain beef, pork, or other ingredients derived from animals, and falsely labeled foodstuffs deceive them into transgressing these principles.
Prevention
The increasing penetration of counterfeit food and beverage into the consumer supply chain is prompting authorities to accelerate existing measures to intercept and identify these products. For example, during 2013, Customs and Excise laboratories in France ran half a million analytical tests last year on wines and beers entering the country, bringing the role of scientific analysis into sharp focus. Counterfeit goods are invariably undetectable by sight and smell alone and therefore samples of suspect goods must be analyzed using sophisticated chemical analysis techniques.
Food standard authorities typically rely on expert food laboratories, which use sophisticated instrumentation and techniques to identify components of foodstuffs. One of the most commonly used techniques involves gas chromatography where the food sample to be tested is first turned into a gas, and then carried through a column by a nonreactive “carrier” gas, or a gas that will not impact the integrity of the food sample, such as helium or another other inert gas like nitrogen. As the sample is carried through the column, it is separated into its individual components. The separate components can then not only be identified, but how much of each component present is can also be determined.
Despite its name, liquid chromatography also employs gas to analyze foodstuffs. The food sample is dissolved into a solvent (hence the “liquid”) and then carried by a moving gas stream (helium or nitrogen) to breakdown the sample into individual constituents. Liquid chromatography’s even more sophisticated cousin, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), can also help identify compounds as low as parts per trillion.
When more sophisticated analysis is required, a technique known as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) can be used. This advanced technique for food counterfeiting investigations involves generating a very high magnetic field around the nuclei in a particular molecule to allow the nuclei to absorb and re-emit electromagnetic radiation. The pattern in which this occurs is detected to identify which particular molecules are present. The intense magnetic field is generated by a super-conducting magnet that can only operate in extremely cold temperatures. This is achieved by immersing the electro-magnet in liquid helium—the coldest substance on the earth.
In all these techniques, high purity specialty gases, which do not interfere or contaminate the food sample in any way, play a critical role.
The authenticity of olive oil can be established to a high degree of certainty by analyzing the most frequently occurring chemical components and developing a “fingerprint” for a particular product. The technique most likely to be used to conduct this sophisticated fingerprinting and profiling of olive oil is NMR.
One of the most reliable techniques for determining the age of a wine or a brandy is looking at the quantity of carbon isotope that exists in these liquors. This method uses radioactive carbon isotopes left in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests carried out about 50 years ago, as well as from the burning of fossil fuels and volcanic eruptions. NMR is also used to conduct this analysis to determine the vintage of a wine quite accurately.
To determine whether caviar is truly from a sturgeon or another type of fish, analysts examine the product’s DNA, the unique marker of a species. Sometimes enhanced with fluorescent dyes, samples can be examined by a photo spectrometer or, if more sophisticated test is required, the NMR is once again brought into play. DNA testing is also proving an effective way to identify the authenticity of basmati rice, since rice varieties have different DNA fingerprints.
After saffron, vanilla is the world’s most expensive spice, and some manufacturers add coumarin to vanilla products to increase the vanilla flavor perception. Coumarin is a phytochemical found in many plant species, the main source being the tonka bean. It has a sweet herbaceous odor and has been used in food, tobacco, and cosmetics as a flavoring and fragrance material. However, coumarin has been shown to be damaging to liver cells, and has been prohibited from being added to food in the U.S. since 1940. Liquid chromatography, HPLC, and even ultra-high performance chromatography (UHPLC) have proved to be effective scientific methods to determine the presence of coumarin in vanilla extract products.
The demand for the specialty gases that facilitate the detection of ever lower levels of chemicals in food is on the increase. For example, Linde offers the food industry a range of high purity specialty gases that include nitrogen and helium for gas chromatography mass spectrometry, nitrogen for liquid chromatography mass spectrometry, liquid helium for NMR, and helium gas for HPLC and UHPLC.
However, the integrity and purity of the gas is only as good as the equipment that delivers it to the point of use. For instance, Linde says it can ensure its gases are delivered to the instrumentation without comprising their quality—often up to a purity level of 99.9999 percent—through its specialty gases equipment.
Harrison is global head of specialty gases and specialty equipment at Linde Gases in Germany. Reach him at [email protected].
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