Food Adulteration: How to Reduce Your Risk

Author: Ramin Jahromi of Eurofins Nutrition Analysis Center (Des Moines, IA)

While food adulteration has been a hot topic for many years, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the problem. Increased demand for beverages, fruit juice, spices, dietary supplements, meat, and poultry in conjunction with a partial or complete shutdown of industry, shortage of agricultural workers, and need for supplies to fulfill demand has inundated the supply chain. Heightened demand for supplies and a strained global supply chain created a favorable environment for increased economically motivated adulteration of ingredients and finished products.

Why would food be adulterated?

Some driving forces for adulteration of food, beverages, ingredients, and supplements include:

• Opportunity to make an illicit profit
• Premium foodstuff in short supply
• Lack of raw material (fruit/honey/agave) to fulfill an existing contract
• High commodity prices
• Presence of cheaper adulterants
• Companies not testing their incoming raw materials
• Suppliers believing they will not be caught
• Purchasing from an unknown supplier

With the increased risk of fraudulent activity, a risk assessment and strict quality control plan must be in place to check incoming raw ingredients for authenticity and adulteration.

Common forms of food and beverage adulteration include:

• Adding undeclared acids or sugars
• Extending an expensive juice with a cheaper one
• Adventitious mixing of different juices due to poor GMP
• Using low quality and expired ingredients

Why you should be concerned about adulterated products

Adulterated ingredients entering your product can result in serious risk for your company. Some potential consequences include:

• Economic loss
• Long-term damage to brand reputation
• Potential consumer health issues and death

Most suppliers will supply you with what you have ordered, however, you should be cautious. Whenever possible, only use suppliers that you have visited and audited or have been approved by a third party, such as SGF IRMA scheme for fruit juices. Using an approved supplier should not preclude you from testing products from these suppliers as part of your product verification scheme.

What does food adulteration testing consist of?

A good approach for determining authenticity is to analyze the product for indicators of adulteration. Principle tools can be a combination of:

• Microscopy: Does the material look like it is supposed to?
• Compositional Analysis: Are the components present in the right proportions?
• Molecular Approach: Special characteristics associated with target molecules such as chirality and isotopic Enrichment levels
• Targeted Approach: For markers associated with likely adulterants
• Non-Targeted Analytical approaches: No specific target, looking at the sample as a “whole”

Eurofins US Food & Feed Testing network of laboratories is a world leader in food authenticity and adulteration testing. Visit our authenticity testing services page to see more information about the services we offer.

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