The manufacture and sale of food is one of the largest and most widespread operations across the planet. The larger a business sector, the greater the opportunities for criminals to attack and profit from it, and the food industry is no exception.Food fraud/crime can be split into two main types:
- The direct contamination, adulteration of food products for ideological ends or to extort money
- The fraudulent placement of food onto the market which has been altered, diluted, substituted (to include counterfeiting) or misrepresented with the sole aim of financial benefit
GLOBAL ECONOMIC COST
The scale of food fraud, and its cost to the global economy in terms of global production value is hard to define. However, in 2014 the Grocery Manufacturers Association estimated that fraud may cost the global food industry 10-15 billion USD per year and impact some 10% of food products. More recently, others have estimated that food fraud costs the global
economy 49 billion USD.
In the UK alone, the food sector is worth up to ?200 billion annually. While no definite figures are available for food fraud losses in the UK, if we take 3% as the estimated loss rate from fraud across the UK economy?and apply this to food it could equate to a ?5.8 billion loss to consumers