Food fraud reports published by global regulatory agencies during 2023 do not provide evidence of a consistent, significant trend during 2023. The activity associated with official food fraud and food safety reports remained fairly consistent across the four quarters of 2023. 

The top three commodities with the most food fraud reports varies depending on the source of reports and the tool used:

·       Using official reports only, ‘Fruit, vegetables & legumes’, ‘Milk & diary products’ and ‘Beverages’ are the top three.

·       Using official, media & peer reviewed publication reports, ‘Honey’, ‘Herbs & Spices’ and ‘Meat & Poultry’ are the top three. 

Although the top three foods with the greatest number of reports is different depending on which tool / data source is used, five of the commodities are common in both the average of official reports only and data from Food Chain ID. In fact, many of these commodities are also common in Food Chain ID’s data over a ten-year period, demonstrating that these foods are most commonly reported as being fraudulent, year on year. 

It should be noted that the featuring of commodities in this report does not necessarily mean that these are the world’s most fraudulent foods, as many of these commodities are often the subject of targeted sampling and analysis by regulators and inter-agency operations conducted by Europol, Interpol etc… Other factors can also have an influence, for example, the listing of honey as the commodity with the greatest number of food fraud reports in 2023 by Food Chain ID was due to a high number of peer reviewed publications on honey authenticity. 

The number of official food fraud reports published, by an average of thirty-six sources, is very low at only ~9% of food safety reports. If analysis of official food fraud reports are to be meaningful, more regulatory agencies should publish their data in an open access format. 

Botanical origin fraud was the most reported type of food fraud in 2023, followed by dilution or substitution, and animal origin fraud, which perhaps is an indication that fraudsters are recognising that consumers have become more interested in origin issues. 

This report is the first annual report to be produced for this Partner project. 

For 2024, Gold and Platinum FAN Partners will be sent a quarterly dashboard at the end of each quarter, and it is anticipated that the 2024 annual report will be published on the FAN website in April 2025.