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According to the first EU-wide intellectual property crime threat assessment from Europol and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), most criminal activity involving counterfeiting is carried out by increasingly professionalised organised crime networks, which can reap large profits while running relatively few risks.

Food and drinks remain highly popular items for counterfeiters, with the EU consistently emerging as a major destination market for counterfeit food and drinks. Detected counterfeit food products include baby milk powder, stock cubes, cheese, coffee, olive oil and pasta. Several of these goods have been found in groceries and supermarkets, illustrating that they also infiltrate the legal supply chain. As the counterfeit goods are almost always of substandard quality and produced in unhygienic environments, they can pose a serious risk to the health and wellbeing of consumers. In some cases, counterfeit food has even been found to contain dangerous or hazardous ingredients. Law enforcement authorities regularly detect other types of counterfeit goods alongside counterfeit food and drinks, highlighting how organised crime groups are frequently involved in trading an ever wider range of different counterfeit goods. In general, there appears to be an overall professionalisation of the organised crime groups involved in food counterfeiting.

Besides food, counterfeit alcoholic beverages pose a considerable risk to EU consumers. Spirits and wine are especially popular goods targeted for counterfeiting by organised crime groups. They frequently place cheap wine in bottles containing fake expensive wine labels, sometimes even adding pure alcohol on counterfeit spirits. Production methods have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, with some organised crime groups operating their own production lines, including the packaging and labelling of the product. Another method is to use legitimate production lines one day a week or month for the production of counterfeits.

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This review paper gives the some of the outcomes of two EU FP7 Projects - EDEN and SNIFFER on the development of food defence analyses in the food chain. Food defence guidelines have been developed based on a parallel system to food safety HACCP analysis which include systems such as vulnerability analysis and critical control points (VACCP), and threat assessment critical control points (TACCP). Once mapping of the gaps and needs had been carried out, a secondary aim of the food defence work in the EDEN project was to test new technologies both targeted and untargeted that could be used for food defence purposes. The SNIFFER project (Sensory devices network for food supply chain security) addressed problems related to the detection of biological and chemical agents in the food supply chain, by looking at commercially available sensors in a sensor network that could be deployed at vulnerable points in the food supply chain. 

Food defence practices can help prevent deliberate contamination, be it motivated by economic, revenge or ideological reasons. Food defence should therefore be an integral part of food supply chain integrity and not just an afterthought in the wake of an incident. The detection tools investigated by EDEN and SNIFFER have potential, but a wider range of contaminants and food matrices needs to be investigated before these tools could be broadly adopted.

Read the full paper at: Food Defence Analysis