Food could contain unmarked allergens like peanuts or even sawdust as safety standards drop, a food fraud expert warned.
With imports entering Europe no longer checked on our behalf at the Dutch port of Rotterdam, and the access lost to shared intelligence on food fraud and to labs able to detect counterfeit ingredients, the UK's "the first line of protection for food coming over the border" has "disappeared", Professor Chris Elliott told The Sunday Times.
Food crime includes misrepresenting the quality, safety, origin or freshness of a product, swapping ingredients for an inferior substance, and including substances not on the label to "lower costs or fake a higher quality", according to the Food Standards Agency (FSA). The government agency says it "can be seriously harmful to consumers, food businesses and the wider food industry".
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Ingredients, a category including herbs, spices oils, nuts, seeds, sugar, rice, pasta and flour, are the most likely products with authenticity issues around the world, according to Food Forensics research reported by The Times.
Mislabelled products and unlisted ingredients – whether accidental or criminal – are common occurrences. In just the last two months since December 2022, supermarkets like Aldi, M&S and Morrisons have recalled products containing undeclared ingredients, or with potential allergens not sufficiently emphasised on the label.
Products like cumin have also been known to contain peanuts and almonds. From oats to crustaceans, unlisted ingredients pose a risk to the life and health of people with food allergies. Border checks and food safety inspections should lower this risk, but the number of food safety inspections in the UK has fallen in recent years.
Prof Elliott fears the UK is at its highest risk of a major food scandal since the 'mad cow disease' – bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) – of the 1980s and 1990s. British beef products remained banned in many countries for decades, and people who lived in the UK in that period are unable to donate blood in many countries as a result.
Despite this risk, the government has put off implementing checks for goods entering the UK from the EU, saying it would announce a new approach early this year. The FSA's chief executive, Emily Miles, said the risk is "more inviting" to exploit "the longer we don't have those routine controls".
"Criminals must be rubbing their hands together", Prof Elliott told The Times, adding: "Food coming to the UK via Europe is treated the same way as food that goes to Beirut. There are no checks or inspections [by EU inspectors] and there hasn’t been an uplift in the number of inspections of that food when it comes into the UK."
Farming, veterinary and meat industry groups have previously warned the delay on post-Brexit checks was an "accident waiting to happen", the Financial Times reported in May last year.
A spokesperson for the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs said: "Our Food Authenticity research programme is developing robust new methods to verify food labelling, helping industry and enforcers to protect consumers from food fraud."
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