Global Food Fraud Trends and Their Mitigation Strategies: The Case of Some Dairy Products: A Review

Abstract

This review was initiated with the objective of assessing global food fraud trends and their mitigation strategies with special emphasis on some dairy products. Different aspects of food fraud such as the types of food fraud (adulteration, tampering, counterfeiting, artificial enhancement, use of non-declared, unapproved, or banned biocides, misrepresentation of nutritional content, fraudulent labeling claims and removal of authentic constituents etc), global food fraud trends, why is food fraud a growing concern, incidents of food fraud, top ten food fraud vulnerable food ingredients and milk and milk based products fraud and their mitigation strategies to address food fraud were discussed. The increasing trend in food fraud practices led to food safety concerns; which led companies to build brands on reputable basis for safety and quality. In the meantime markets grew from local to global. This led to complexity of supply chains and this has aggravated food fraud. Based on this, it was concluded that fighting food fraud and adulteration remains a race between the criminals committing food fraud and the scientists developing new methods to uncover food fraud, frequent analysis and quality control measures  are essential to create awareness among the public about malpractices in food  supply chains, consumers must be aware about the kind of food they consume, the regulatory authorities should realize and practice frequent inspection of the market to check whether food products meets the minimum legal standards. It is also recommended that academic institutions should shift from intervention and respond to prevention, define the value of technology and enforcement of food laws and education in behavioral sciences and criminology. The industry’s food fraud prevention focus has to be holistic and has to build consumer confidence, industry has to engage governments in request for comments and risk assessment. The governments has to focus broadly on product fraud not just adulterants, define food fraud in laws not just in regulations or guidance documents, create and engage public private partnership forum and risk assessment.

Keywords: Global, Food, Fraud, mitigation, safety, dairy, products