The Shocking Scale of Olive Oil Fraud
What if I told you that the premium olive oil sitting in your kitchen cabinet might be a complete lie? You’d probably think I was being dramatic, but the numbers behind olive oil fraud are genuinely terrifying. Cases of olive oil fraud continue to rise with multiple reports in the last year alone. Recently, Portuguese officials announced they had seized over 16,000 litres of cooking oil falsely labeled as olive oil, along with 82,000 counterfeit labels. This isn’t just a European problem either – it’s happening right under our noses globally.
Italian police confirmed they had cracked a criminal ring blending low-grade oils with chemicals and selling them as extra virgin olive oil, threatening consumer safety and undermining PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) or PGI (Protected Geographical Indication). The scale is mind-boggling when you realize that an increasing trend of incidents by 166% is forecasted for olive oil. Think about it – that’s more than doubling in just one year.
The financial incentives are massive. “You can sell a half-litre bottle of olive oil for between 20 and 70 euros,” says Arsen Khachaturyants, CEO of Arsenio. “Fraudsters see this as an opportunity, by just labelling oil as olive oil, or olive oil as extra virgin olive oil.” When there’s that much money at stake, you can bet criminals are paying attention.
But here’s what really gets me – food adulteration is becoming increasingly sophisticated, with some methods altering products at the molecular level which are often beyond the detection capabilities of current laboratory techniques or the techniques required are very expensive. We’re not dealing with simple scams anymore. These are high-tech operations that can fool even experts.
The Honey Trap
Now, let’s talk about honey – nature’s sweet gift that’s been turned into a playground for fraudsters. Honey is one of the most counterfeited food products you’ll find on the market. This is perhaps attributed to the demanding manufacturing process. Commonly, producers cut the original product with similarly sweet substances like beet sugar to increase the quantity produced. It’s basically liquid gold being watered down with cheap substitutes.
Honey fraud is similarly prevalent, with cheaper sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup being added to natural honey. Stable isotope analysis and rapid screening tools can help to detect honey adulteration, verify claims about floral or geographical origin, and differentiate authentic manuka honey — which commands a high price — from fake versions. When you’re paying premium prices for manuka honey, you want the real deal, not some corn syrup concoction.
The detection methods are becoming more sophisticated, but so are the criminals. To detect fake honey, check the label! If anything other than honey is labeled as its constituent, then it’s a counterfeit product. It sounds simple, but many people don’t even think to look.
Fish Tales and Seafood Scams
Here’s something that’ll make your next sushi dinner interesting – fish fraud is absolutely rampant. In order 2013, a study from Oceana found that 38 percent of all restaurant fish samples they tested were mislabeled. The wrong fish was being served. In sushi restaurants, it’s worse while grocery stores fared much better. So basically, there’s a one-in-three chance that your “red snapper” is actually something completely different.
Because most consumers can’t easily differentiate between the many varieties of fish that exist, fish is commonly counterfeited. Cheap or undesirable seafood (with high mercury levels) may be mislabeled as a more expensive or safer fish. For example, escolar can be sold as white tuna, tilapia is often sold as red snapper, and farmed fish can be mislabeled as wild-caught. This isn’t just about money – it’s about health risks too.
The implications go beyond just being ripped off. Mislabeled fish could have come from polluted water; if eaten by pregnant women, mercury or cadmium could affect health of an unborn child. Suddenly, that sushi roll doesn’t seem so innocent, does it?
The Spice Must Flow (But Is It Real?)
Spices are another goldmine for food fraudsters, and saffron takes the crown as the most counterfeited spice. Because of its high price, saffron is vulnerable to fraud for those who try to bargain hunt. Saffron counterfeiters often pass off dried safflowers, onions dyed orange or red, and turmeric as saffron. When you’re paying hundreds of dollars per pound for saffron, you’d expect to get the real thing.
To make sure you’re not getting fake saffron, buy threads rather than ground saffron, and smell it—but don’t rely on your nose alone. Some saffron counterfeiters mix in a few real strands with the fake ones. It’s like the old saying – if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
How to spot fake spices: this is very difficult because most spice bottles don’t come with a label. Instead, watch out for the price. If it’s too cheap to be true, then it’s probably counterfeit. Your wallet might thank you for that “bargain” spice, but your taste buds definitely won’t.
Coffee Con Artists
Your morning coffee might not be what you think it is. Coffee is a huge business, and thus, fraudsters often mix ground coffee with cheaper fillers like corn, chicory, or even roasted soybeans to make big money. While this reduces the quality of the coffee, consuming foreign materials in the form of a beverage can lead to digestive discomfort and allergic reactions. So that upset stomach might not be from too much caffeine – it could be from twigs and corn husks.
Believe it or not, there’s counterfeit coffee! Some manufacturers mix their coffee grounds with twigs, stone, corn husks, and other ingredients in order to increase the weight of the grinds and decrease the amount of product the manufacturer has to use for one bag of coffee grounds. It’s like paying for premium coffee and getting yard waste instead.
To spot fake coffee is indeed difficult unless you have a great sense of smell and expertise required. Instead, buy whole coffee beans and grind them just just before boiling and serving — you won’t want to have your coffee any other way! Your morning routine just got a bit more complicated, but at least you’ll know what you’re drinking.
Why Does Food Fraud Happen?
Money talks, and in the food industry, it’s practically screaming. The exact cost of this type of fraud to the global food industry is difficult to calculate given its clandestine nature, but it is estimated to cost producers $40 billion annually. That’s billion with a B. When there’s that much money on the table, criminals will find a way to get their hands on it.
The recent increase in incidents of olive oil fraud and mislabelling reflect the impact of squeezed supplies on the global market, explains Eurof Uppington, CEO and founder of Amfora, a Switzerland-based importer of extra virgin olive oils. “There are low levels of fraud all the time, but it’s gone into overdrive because of the rise in price and the fall in supply,” he says. It’s simple economics – when supply drops and prices rise, fraud becomes more profitable.
Food fraud can be defined as any intentional action, taken to deceive customers about the quality and content of the food products for financial gain. The selling of fake food around the world has become a highly lucrative illegal activity. It’s organized crime moving into your grocery store.
The problem is also getting worse because of climate change. Climate change significantly impacted olive oil production for the 2023/2024 season. Global olive oil production is expected to be the lowest in over a decade, at around 2.4 million tons. When Mother Nature reduces supply, human greed fills the gap with fake products.
How to Spot Fake Olive Oil
Here’s where things get practical – how do you protect yourself from olive oil fraud? First, understand what you’re looking for. Some fraudsters are substituting the precious “liquid gold” with much cheaper seed oil. Seed oil is transparent, so they colour it with chlorophyll, to add green tints, and use carotenoids to obtain yellow traits. This creates an olive oil-ish colour. But looks can be deceiving.
However, even if they look similar, big differences remain. Seed oil has no flavour or smell, while “olive oil is never tasteless. It can be more or less sweet, bitter or zesty, but will never be tasteless”, Food Science professor Maurizio Servili tells Euronews. Your taste buds are actually your first line of defense.
When buying or ordering extra-virgin olive oil, always vet out the information on the bottle. Make sure there’s a date and location for the harvest, check if you can scan a QR code to trace the production chain, and look up for seals from a third-party. If the bottle looks like it was designed by someone who’s never seen real olive oil, it probably was.
Price is also a major indicator. With olive oil prices at record highs and supply at decade-lows, this kind of fraud will only escalate. If you’re getting a “deal” on premium olive oil, ask yourself why nobody else has discovered this amazing bargain.
What’s Being Done to Stop It
The good news is that the fight against food fraud is finally getting serious attention. The good news for manufacturers and consumers is that the olive oil industry, in collaboration with law enforcement, is working hard to tackle fraud. In 2022, the EU introduced new rules on conformity checks for Olive Oil, as well as methods for analysing it. Governments are starting to crack down, but it’s a game of cat and mouse.
To spot trends and instances of food fraud, we gather information from a variety of sources such as consumer or industry complaints, news articles, science publications and presentations, databases, other governments, academia, and subject matter experts. We detect food fraud through FDA inspections and regularly create and test new tools for detecting food fraud. We can also detect food fraud through routine or targeted sampling assignments. It’s like having food detectives working around the clock.
Using stable isotope analysis, scientists can effectively trace the geographical origin of a food item, differentiate between organic and conventionally produced foods, and detect adulteration by identifying inconsistencies in the expected isotopic signatures. Rapid screening approaches are another method used to detect fraud and verify the authenticity and provenance of food. Science is finally catching up to the criminals.
The technology is getting impressive too. One option is to integrate technologies such as blockchain and smart contract so fraud can be more effectively prevented. The use of data mining and machine learning technologies to monitor the movement of products along the supply chain can aid tracking and monitoring of any unauthorised itinerary and its movements. Blockchain isn’t just for cryptocurrency anymore – it’s protecting your dinner.
Your next grocery shopping trip just got a lot more interesting, didn’t it? The world of food fraud is like a hidden layer of deception running beneath everything we eat, but now you know what to look for. Trust your senses, check those labels, and remember – if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
