Technology that is also used for human forensics and ivory tracking is being used to reduce labelling fraud in the fresh produce sector.
Innovative commercial science company Food Forensics, founded in 2011 and winners at this year’s Re:Fresh, have spent the last year building up a database of different chemical isotopes in a range of products.
The concept is simple: once a big enough database was in place to provide a commercial offer, the company can validate the origin of a product by matching its chemical make-up with the known values in its records. It is a chemical testing procedure that overtakes the traditional paper traceability to provide a more accurate ‘signpost’ to the product’s origin.
Founder and managing director Alison Johnson comes from a commercial and goods supply chain background, and says the technology can provide brand protection, protect victims of fraud and create a new level playing field for UK growers, suppliers and retailers.
Johnson says they are deliberately careful with the terminology they use. “It is a signposting tool not a golden bullet. An anomaly in the testing might be one of three things: an unsampled area, a packaging error or fraud.”
Nonetheless the potential for real criminal activity is in part what drives the project, as Johnson says fraud is “endemic” and admits she has become “incredibly cynical” of labelling on produce since founding the company.
She gives an example of how testing within the fresh produce sector helped one struggling business to recover. “It was losing market share and struggling to compete, and now it has completely turned around. The technology exposed some weaknesses in a competitor that enabled this business to grow as a genuine supplier.”
Johnson emphasises that a sample is never all wrong – it’s more likely to be ‘dilution’ of a UK product with cheaper export options.
“You can target the testing and ‘follow the money’, for example if Dutch prices are suddenly very low it might be worth doing a lot of testing. You can use it as part of a regular due diligence scheme, or you can target a known error.”
Testing can remain completely confidential and anonymous, which emphasises the appeal of dealing with any errors without drawing attention to yourself. “It’s about knowing about an error first, rather than being told about it by someone else so you can deal with it quietly,” says Johnson.
She says the uptake has been good among growers, although some do see it a threat.
One factor that may put people off is price, but Johnson says it is cheap relative to the value of brand protection. She stresses that the implications of a negative story are massive. If growers are happy to provide database samples then there’s no cost for validation testing – otherwise the price is volume-related and Johnson says it is similar to DNA analysis in cost.
Thanks to her supply chain background, Johnson has approached the project from a commercial perspective and has employed scientists rather than the other way round. This has helped her gain access to crops although she says this is still one of the company’s major difficulties.
“We use authentic products in that we physically select them ourselves. We can be in and out in five minutes, and are happy to travel. We collect products from nurseries, farms and orchards and where we can’t get access we go to regional Grow Your Owns.”
The Food Forensics laboratory at the Norwich research park is smaller than expected, although the company has recently doubled capacity by taking on another machine. Produce samples are freeze dried, before being milled to fine powder and then undergoing testing. Results are recorded, analysed and mapped onto the UK according to their chemical content.
The company now has around 15 products with working data sets, including tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and asparagus.
Johnson says the next steps are to encourage the supply chain to embrace the step. “If we only have segments of cooperation then you squeeze bad practice into small areas. We are looking for a holistic uptake to create a fully traceable food chain. We don’t want to create another bad food story, we want the industry to engage proactively and willingly.”
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