Food fraud innovators wanted

The European Union-wide FoodIntegrity project, which is coordinated by Fera Science, comprises participants from industry, academia, research institutes, technology providers and a global network of stakeholders.

According to Fera Science, it is designed to “rationalise and harmonise” capability to provide a coherent structure and process for assuring the food supply chain.

“We now want innovative research proposals from the international research community

FoodIntegrity coordinator Paul Brereton

The grants are available to consortia with research and development ideas in four key areas.

The areas are as follows: The standardisation and harmonisation of untargeted food integrity methods; Innovative approaches to assure the integrity of complex foods; A feasibility study of how information can be shared along the supply chain to identify risks to the integrity of food; and rapid, on-site, cost-effective methods for feed and food fraud detection.

FoodIntegrity coordinator Paul Brereton said: “As ’horsegate’ and similar scandals [have] underlined, providing assurance to consumers and other stakeholders about the safety, authenticity and quality of food is of vital importance to the UK and wider European agri-food economy.”

The horsegate scandal, which erupted in January 2013 when a sample taken from a Tesco beef burger was judged to contain around 29% horse DNA, thrust the food industry under an uncomfortable spotlight.

Brereton said such incidents are still occurring.

“We know that food fraud is still happening on a massive scale. In the last six months alone data collected and analysed by Fera has found more than 200 incidents of reported food fraud, from the ’wine’ that contained no grapes, to ’finest’ honey that was clearly old and poor quality,” Brereton sain.

“Other examples include undeclared soya and wheat in almonds, faked famous brand beers, sugar added to ’no added sugar’ drinks and mislabelling for a range of produce, including hazelnut oil and pork.”

To combat this, Fera is developing cutting edge technologies to assure food provenance as well as verify labelling claims for a wide range of products.

“It is also leading ground breaking research into developing systems that will anticipate food fraud, for example what will the impact of failed harvests in one part of the world on the risk of food fraud in another,” Brereton said.

“But we now want innovative research proposals from the international research community, to work with us in developing methods and systems to assure the supply chain and protect consumers against food fraud,” he added.

The deadline for proposals is 14th August and applicants can submit a proposal at: https://secure.fera.defra.gov.uk/foodintegrity/index.cfm?sectionid=22