Food fraud is a growing issue for manufacturers and consumers across the food industry. It’s thought 1 in 10 foods globally are affected by some level of fraud, whether that’s adulteration, mislabelling or substitution. This can affect everyday products like oils, preserves, and meat.
When fraud enters the supply chain, it often goes unnoticed until it’s too late, with just 20% of cases being reported. As a result, businesses are likely more at risk of the consequences of food fraud than they think. These consequences include damaged consumer trust, food safety risks, costly recalls and strained retailer relationships.
In an era of complex global supply chains, the above figure shows that even the most diligent businesses are vulnerable to food fraud. That’s why leading manufacturers are investing in stronger systems and more proactive processes to both comply with regulations, and to protect their brand.
What Is Food Fraud?
Food fraud is any intentional deception in the production or supply of food for economic gain. Unlike accidental errors, fraud is deliberate and often designed to be difficult to detect. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) and the National Food Crime Unit (NFCU) identify it as one of the most pressing threats to the integrity of our food system.
Food fraud can typically take several forms:
- Adulteration: adding inferior or undeclared ingredients, like watering down wine, mixing cheap oils into olive oil.
- Substitution: replacing a high-value ingredient with a cheaper one, like selling white fish as cod.
- Mislabelling: presenting products as something they are not, for example claiming products are local when they might be imported.
- Counterfeiting: producing fake versions of branding goods or certification marks.
Why Manufacturers Struggle With Food Fraud
Despite strong food safety standards nowadays, manufacturers are facing a growing exposure to fraud within their supply chains. The issue isn’t negligence on the manufacturers part, but rather visibility and control in a system that’s become too complex to monitor in a traditional, paper-based method.
There are 3 key reasons why manufacturers are struggling with food fraud:
1. Complex, Multi-Tier Supply Chains
Most food manufacturers now source ingredients and raw materials through several layers of suppliers that can span multiple countries. Each additional handoff from layer to layer creates blind spots where fraudulent activity can occur.
For example, seafood and olive oil often pass through several intermediaries before reaching the UK market, which can make origin verification difficult. Without supply chain visibility, even diligent businesses can unknowingly bring adulterated or mislabelled goods into production.
2. Fragmented Data and Disconnected Systems
A lack of connected data is also a big vulnerability for many food manufacturers. Authenticity checks, supplier records and lab reports are often scattered across different systems, spreadsheets and inboxes, and if you still use paper records for your production records this can create serious blind spots for your business.
Food fraud thrives in the resulting gaps as your business faces delayed detection of anomalies, inefficient tracebacks when issues do arise, and missed patterns for recurring issues that might be connected to a particular supplier or ingredient.
3. Market and Regulator Pressure
The need to stay competitive while meeting expectations for sustainability and ethical sourcing is creating a constant pressure to do more with less. In practice this means that many procurement and technical teams are leaning heavily on documentation for evidence and compliance.
The problem with a heavy volume of documentation is verification fatigue, especially if documentation is paper-based. Teams might look to cut corners to save time on manual checks, and this can build a false confidence on documentation that looks complete, but isn’t truly verified to the right degree which can result in fraud slipping through.
The Cost and Impact of Food Fraud
When it occurs, food fraud poses a financial, operational and reputational threat for food businesses. What might begin as a small shortcut like a diluted ingredient or undeclared substitution can quickly escalate into a business-critical issue.
The effects of food fraud ripple far beyond the affected batch. You might have to halt production lines or quarantine finished goods. In cases where affected products have already left your premises, you’ll also have to recall those products, and entire product ranges might need to be withdrawn from the market.
What’s worse is that even if the fraud originated before the affected materials arrived at your site, as the manufacturer it’s your brand on the packaging, which makes you accountable. As a result, there’s both a fiscal cost and a reputational cost, the latter of which can have a long-lasting effect on your bottom line.
Figures on food recalls typically run into the millions of pounds, and in the most serious cases can exceed £10 million once indirect costs are factored in. This risk is why UK food manufacturers are now implementing fraud prevention strategies into their operations and existing quality assurance procedures.
You can learn more about the cost of food recalls, and how to handle a recall if one should occur, in our food recalls guide.
How Traceability Helps To Tackle Food Fraud
To effectively tackle food fraud, food manufacturers need to close the gaps in the visibility and data of their production process. Implementing an electronic traceability system can help you do that, with a connected, verifiable record of every ingredient, batch and step of your production process.
Some of the ways this type of system can help include the following:
Visibility Over Ingredients From Goods-In
Implementing digital traceability provides full visibility across every stage of your production process, from goods-in to dispatch. By capturing real-time data at every step, you'll gain the ability to monitor ingredient movement, verify the ingredients present in products, and confirm that only approved materials enter production.
This transparency helps to prevent fraudulent substitutions and builds resistance to any incidents that do happen, as it allows your team to act quickly to isolate affected batches and minimise the resulting disruption.
Centralised Quality and Compliance Records
Electronic traceability systems are designed to centralise all information on your production process. Instead of manually managing spreadsheets and paper trails, these systems allow you to view comprehensive details and history of the batches you’re producing, with information including:
- Ingredient or commodity details
- Movement and usage of ingredients
- Quality assurance and allergen information
- Testing details and results
- Certification data and evidence
Having this information readily available will simplify your audits, support your regulatory reporting, and help you demonstrate due diligence to retailers and customers.
Faster, More Confident Recall Response
When potential fraud is detected, you need to act quickly, as every second counts. Digital traceability allows you to pinpoint exactly which batches, products or lines are affected in just minutes.
This speed will reduce the impact of a recall on your business, both financially and reputationally. You’ll be able to act decisively and maintain the confidence of retailers and customers. A robust traceability system also turns what was once a stressful, reactive process into a controlled, data-driven one.
Building A Food Fraud Prevention Strategy
To best protect your business from food fraud, you need to build a proactive strategy or system that makes fraud difficult and detectable. Ideally this will involve ingredient visibility right from the moment it arrives on site, staff awareness of the best practices around fraud prevention, and connecting all elements of data on your production process into a single, centralised framework.
“Transparency is the best deterrent to food fraud” - BRC Guidance
Your food fraud prevention plan might look something like the following…
1
Strengthen Your Supplier Due Diligence
Prevention needs to start as early as possible, ideally before ingredients are even arriving on your site. Establish thorough verification processes and ongoing monitoring of your suppliers. Make sure to check supplier certifications, audit histories and their transparency around sourcing.
Maintain centralised supplier records and update them regularly. This kind of consistent oversight will help you identify potential fraud before it enters your operations.
2
Implement Targeted Testing To Verify Ingredients
Setting up testing and verification procedures will provide your team with objective evidence of authenticity. This doesn’t have to mean expensive lab programs either, simple checks like Certificate of Authenticity validation, sensory inspection, or occasional third-party lab tests can offer strong protection without significant cost.
If you have a limited budget here, a risk-based approach works best, focusing testing where the risk of fraud is highest.
We also recommend linking test results with your traceability and QA data, to ensure results are visible and part of your ongoing monitoring process.
3
Digitise Traceability and Production Records
Paper-based records and manual spreadsheets create data gaps where fraud could occur. Digitising your traceability processes gives real-time visibility across your production line, from goods-in through to dispatch, allowing for forwards and backwards traceability.
As well as closing gaps for potential fraud, digital production records also reduce investigation times, support BRC and FSA compliance and will help you strengthen overall product integrity.
4
Train Your Team On Food Fraud
Any sort of strategy or system you implement is only effective if your team knows how to follow it and understands its importance. You should setup regular training sessions on things like:
- Food fraud awareness
- Traceability procedures
- How to identify suspicious activity
This will help your staff act as the first line of defence, and when they’re confident in how to record data correctly and escalate concerns, that will create a culture of shared responsibility.
5
Establish Monitoring and Alert Systems
Fraud prevention is an ongoing process, and one that requires continuous monitoring to close out potential gaps. Implementing a system that can flag any anomalies or quality concerns with batches or production runs will allow you to investigate these issues quickly before they escalate.
Our own Stevens Traceability System makes this kind of monitoring easier as it provides your team with complete visibility and control over the steps in your production process, including QA controls and comprehensive batch information from goods-in.
You should also look to undertake regular reviews of your supply chain risk and wider industry alerts (like FSA alerts) to make sure your strategy remains responsive to emerging threats.
Please note we are not a regulator or legal body, and are only providing guidance and support to assist businesses in combatting food fraud. For legal compliance requirements, we always recommend businesses refer to the FSA and relevant regulatory bodies for the most accurate and up-to-date guidance.
Next Steps To Strengthen Your Defence Against Food Fraud
Effective food fraud prevention doesn’t happen overnight, and it might seem daunting where you need to focus your efforts. However, small but practical steps can quickly improve your visibility, control and confidence in your production line. Here’s how you can get started:
1. Assess Your Current Level of Traceability
Take stock of your existing systems and data. How easily can you trace a product from raw material to finished product? Are there any gaps you need to close?
Try running a recall simulation using one finished product, and note how long it takes to identify every input batch and supplier. This will help you understand your baseline, and spot opportunities for improvement.
2. Prioritise Risk and Supplier Oversight
Identify which ingredients or suppliers pose the greatest risk of fraud or authenticity issues, and focus your monitoring and documentation efforts there first. You might look to set up Certificate of Authenticity (COA) validation, review supplier certifications and sourcing routes to reduce your exposure.
If you’re a smaller manufacturer, starting small is enough. One high-risk product type or supplier at a time will help you make steady progress to effective prevention.
3. Explore Digital Traceability Options
If your business still relies on paper-based records or manual logs, you should look at implementing an electronic traceability system that will help make recalls faster, audits simpler and fraud detection proactive.
Get in touch with our team to see how the Stevens Traceability System can support your food fraud prevention efforts with either a demo or a discussion on your requirements.
Get started with traceability to prevent food fraud today.
Our traceability solution is ideal for food manufacturers looking to implement traceability to help prevent food fraud in their production line, delivering:
- Full visibility of every batch and ingredient
- Faster, more confident recall response
- Centralised electronic records for compliance
- Allergen controls and QA tools
If you'd like to know more about our traceability system, or would like to organise a quote or demo, complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch.
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