KEY INTERVIEW: New USP Food Fraud Database Helps Industry Mitigate Risk of Food Adulteration

The goal is to provide brand protection, increase consumer trust and support new food safety regulations recently finalized by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

 

USP’s FFD version 2.0 is a continuously updated collection of thousands of ingredients and related records gathered from scientific literature, media publications, regulatory reports, judicial records, and trade associations from around the world. FFD 2.0 is available through an annual subscription.

 

Food fraud, also referred to as economically-motivated adulteration (EMA), is a global economic and public health problem, costing industry an estimated 10 to 15 billion dollars annually and affecting as much as 10% of the global food supply.

 

FoodIngredientsFirst caught up with Jeffrey Moore, (pictured) Ph.D., Science Director for the Food Program at USP, who notes that consumers are more educated and have a lot more interest in food that they are eating. “It all comes down to food integrity,” explains Moore. “Where food is coming from, whether it’s safe, nutritious, and from an industry perspective it can be a really complex challenge to deal with.”

 

“The intersection that we have in this new database, specifically at an ingredients level, allows companies to manage and prioritize where the greatest risks are coming from, from a food safety perspective,” claims Moore. “The ability to look at past incidents of fraud and take steps to protect their supply chains means the company can protect their reputation and ensure customer confidence.”

 

“There is also a lot of consumer interest in transparency and interest from the food industry on how to increase transparency in the supply chain, and that’s actually one of the factors that can also contribute to vulnerability for food fraud to even happen in the first place,” Moore comments. “It’s important to know where a product is coming from or where it is produced which ultimately comes back to this concept of visibility and transparency within supply chains.”

 

Common Adulterations and Food Fraud
“There are types of fraud that are more like artificial enhancements of an ingredient,” explains Moore. “What we often see happening in terms of adulteration of spices is you’ll have a low grade of spice, that isn’t maybe as colorful as it should be and then someone might add an industrial dye to it, to make it look bright and fresh and high quality. Turmeric and lead chromate is a specific example of this, the lead chromate is used to make a low quality spice look like a high quality spice.”

 

“Certainly over the past few months there has been a huge issue with lead and turmeric,” says Karen Everstine, (pictured) Ph.D., Scientific Liaison, USP Food Program.  “Out of the UK came the study of oregano being replaced with olive and myrtle leaves and in the US a couple of months ago, there was an issue with grated parmesan and Italian style cheeses. Certainly spices continue to be challenging obviously, it seems like every few weeks or so there is adulteration within spices.”

 

“There is also a common problem with honey, specifically in the US,” Everstine tells FoodIngredientsFirst. “Honey is another big area which can be substituted with non-honey ingredients or dilution with syrup, like rice fructose syrup, for example. There are also issues around misrepresentation of geographical origin, which is certainly a problem in the US.”

 

“Honey is a very interesting area for us in the US due to our importation structure,” she explains, “I think the main issue is dilution with an alternate form of sugar such as corn syrup or rice fructose syrup. There is a ban of an antibiotic called Chloramphenicol that gets used in honey bee populations sometimes in China, which is not allowed in the US and so we sometimes have heightened inspections for Chloramphenicol and honey upon import.”

 

“We also have elevated import duties on Chinese honey because of anti-dumping. What happens is that people reroute honey through different countries and label it differently as originating from those countries to get it into the US and therefore avoid further inspections for antibiotics,” says Everstine.

 

“Intentionally miss-labeling the geographical origin is certainly a cause to have these extra food safety regulations, which relates back to transparency,” she adds.

 

“Honey is an issue for a number of reasons and certainly dilution is a main problem,” confirms Moore, “It is ongoing in food adulteration in terms of vulnerability for as long as honey has probably been traded for. One of the other interesting things that has caught our attention in the last six months or so, is the prevalence of honey fraud in the European market place, the EU did some surveillance last year or early this year and the findings were quite surprising.”

 

Moore also says: “If you look at the FFD 2.0 in broad terms, then it definitely has the ability to categorize the type of fraud. With food fraud, the substitution, dilution or misrepresentation of food for the purpose of economic gain is not to make people sick; the intent is to make it financially profitable. Having said that, we know that perpetrators make mistakes, and there have certainly been instances where consumers have gotten sick.”

 

“The idea with the new database is to get food companies quickly to the information they need to inform the risk based decision making,” says Everstine. “If you look at something like GFSI, and their GFSI food safety schemes, they are now requiring that food companies have a food fraud vulnerability risk assessment in place and so the FFD 2.0 can be a part of that.”

 

The major benefit to food companies is that they can get information that they need and analytical methods can be used to test the food ingredient,” she explains. “From there, it also gets companies to information about potential hazards, each adulterant and its hazards, and they can use this information to make necessary decisions.”

 

“We are constantly updating the system with new information, but what we haven’t done is an assessment of all the data that’s in there,” claims Moore.  “That is something that we have done in the past, and how it compares with historical data. There is a considerable amount of new data in the database. We are currently focusing on the launch of the FFD 2.0 and getting everyone familiar with the value and the features of it.”

 

Another advantage of USP’s FFD 2.0 is in supporting compliance with new regulatory requirements from the FDA related to food safety. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) requires food manufacturers and retailers to identify and analyze potential hazards including those resulting from EMA as part of their food safety plans. The FFD 2.0 provides hazards reports on specific adulterants, making it easier for manufacturers and retailers to quickly identify ingredients with a known history of adulteration with potentially hazardous substances. The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), an industry-driven initiative providing guidance on food safety management systems, has similar requirements to conduct food fraud vulnerability assessments and develop control plans.

 

“Substances used to adulterate food can include industrial dyes, plasticizers, allergens, or other substances not intended to be consumed by people,” notes Moore. “Smart mitigation of risks starts with reliable data, and the FFD 2.0 is a first good step towards assessing the hazards potentially present in specific food supply chains.”

 

This update of the database – considered  the most comprehensive collection of food fraud records in the world – includes not only thousands of ingredients and related adulterants, but also incident reports, surveillance records and analytical methods gathered from scientific literature, media publications, regulatory records, judicial records and trade associations around the world. New features in FFD 2.0 allow users to identify historical trends and vulnerabilities through a customizable dashboard, which can include automatic alerts of new records of food fraud and automated analytics for ingredients of interest.

 

Dairy Adulteration
The 2008 Chinese milk scandal was a food safety incident in China. The scandal involved milk and infant formula along with other food materials and components being adulterated with melamine. Melamine adulteration of milk in China took the lives of several infants and caused liver and kidney damage in hundreds of thousands of children. It also caused direct losses of $3 billion to the dairy industry in China in the first three months alone.

 

In 2009 USP formed a collaboration with industry to look at new test methodologies to detect adulteration in milk including adulteration with melamine that had led to a lot of research and development of new test methodologies to look for adulteration.

 

“We are now turning these USP reference materials to help industry in verifying that their test methodologies are actually working,” says Moore. “We currently have an authentic, clean genuine milk powder and then also one that is adulterated with melamine, that has recently been introduced at the USP Reference Center and we have three different ones that are coming out in the future with different levels on melamine in. Dealing with the challenge of milk adulteration in this industry in certainly very challenging,” he adds.

 

“Dairy, in general in one of those hi-risk, high vulnerability areas from a food fraud perspective,” notes Moore, “If you type “milk” into our database you are going to get a lot of information on issues that have happened in the past relating to adulteration and not just adulteration with melamine, which is one of the most common types and certainly related to food safety.”

 

“There are a whole group of incidents or ingredients which have been used to adulterate milk in the past,” he confirms.  “When you look at an ingredient or commodity area in terms of risks and vulnerability, like melamine for example, the industry needs better mitigation tools to deal with this type of problem.”

 

Moore also adds: “In recent history that was probably the most impactful or significant cases in terms of food safety and public health and risk to health, but certainly not the only one in history, it just happens to be the one from the last six or seven years that has the most impact.”

 

“It was an eye opener in industry– people have always known about food fraud and adulteration, but it was largely locked into more of a quality issue. This really pointed out how food fraud can lead to a food safety and public health issue,” he states.

 

“More recently and to combat the issues around dairy, we formed a collaboration the International Dairy Federation (IDF), we signed an MOU with them last year, relating to new and better standards involving improving the integrity to dairy in supply chains,” Moore says. “It is certainly one of those areas where better standards for adulteration testing are needed and that is something that we are working very closely together with IDF to maintain.”