Fraudsters give consumers something to chew on

Washington: The expensive "sheep's milk" cheese in a Manhattan market was really made from cow's milk. And a jar of "Sturgeon caviar" was, in fact, Mississippi paddlefish.

Some honey makers dilute their honey with sugar beets or corn syrup, their competitors say, but still market it as 100 per cent pure at a premium price.

And last year, a Fairfax, Virginia, man was convicted of selling 10 million pounds of cheap, frozen catfish fillets from Vietnam as much more expensive grouper, red snapper and flounder. The fish was bought by national chain retailers, wholesalers and food service companies, and ended up on dinner plates across the country.

"Food fraud" has been documented in fruit juice, olive oil, spices, vinegar, wine, spirits and maple syrup, and appears to pose a significant problem in the seafood industry. Victims range from the shopper at the local supermarket to multi-million dollar companies, including E&J Gallo and Heinz USA.

And the US food industry says federal regulators are not doing enough to combat it.

"It's growing very rapidly, and there's more of it than you might think," said James Morehouse, a senior partner at A.T. Kearney Incorporated, which is studying the issue for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the food and beverage industry.

John Spink, a Michigan State University expert on food and packaging fraud, estimates that 5 to 7 per cent of the US food supply is affected but acknowledges the number could be greater. "We know what we seized at the border, but we have no idea what we didn't seize," he said.

Accurate labelling

The job of ensuring that food is accurately labelled largely rests with the Food and Drug Administration. But it has been overwhelmed in trying to prevent food contamination, and combating fraud has remained on a back burner.

The recent development of high-tech tools — including DNA testing — has made it easier to detect fraud that might have gone unnoticed a decade ago. DNA can be extracted from cells of fish and meat and from other foods, such as rice.

Technicians then identify the species by comparing the DNA with a database of samples.

Another tool, isotope ratio analysis, can determine subtle differences between food — whether a fish was farmed or wild, for example.

Heinz USA and Kraft Foods, who have well-established internal controls, recently fell victim to a conspiracy in which the scion of a California farming dynasty was indicted. He was accused of disguising millions of pounds of mouldy tomato paste as a higher-grade product and selling it to food-makers.

Surveillance system

The Food and Drug Administration wants to create a surveillance system that would alert regulators to likely fraud, said Jennifer Thomas, director of enforcement at FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. She said the FDA regularly swaps intelligence with two other agencies that share responsibility for catching seafood fraud. It has also bought a $170,000 DNA sequencer for its Seattle field office.

She pointed to several FDA actions against food fraud in recent months, including the first debarment of a seafood importer, suggesting that may be a deterrent.

Peter Xuong Lam, president of Virginia Star Seafood Corporation of Fairfax, was convicted last year of selling the mislabeled catfish. Ten other individuals and companies were also charged. Lam was sentenced to five years in prison and is barred from importing food into the United States for the next 20 years.