CHAPTER 14. Food Fraud Prevention – Selecting the Right Test, Method, and Sampling Plan

Food fraud is one of the most urgent food industry topics and prevention must consider the entire fraud opportunity. Food fraud is more than just ingredient adulterant substances and can cause harm from all types of fraud and for all products throughout the food supply chain. While the most complex and challenging activity will be authenticity testing, the selection of the right test, method, sampling plan, and test frequency must consider not only a single incident but the vulnerability of the entire system. This chapter focuses on identifying the root-cause created by the human adversaries and the reduction of the vulnerability by focusing on criminology and specifically Situational Crime Prevention. A case study is provided that reviews the criminology concepts of “hot products” and “hot spots” to help support resource-allocation decision-making. By focusing on the root-cause, very direct and holistic countermeasures and control systems can be identified and very precisely applied. By focusing on the precise hot product and hot spot, there can be an effective selection of the right test, method, and sampling plan.