Was my wine watered down, has my honey been sweetened? These are some of the questions which bother us quite often. Compared to other industries, the food industry has low profit margins. Food fraud is the activity of unscrupulous vendors trying to maximize revenues by adding chemicals or diluting the declared contents with less expensive ingredients and counterfeiting in order to boost those profits.
Adding less expensive items to the original wine, like fruit juices, water, and sweeteners, that have nothing to do with the grapes or fermentation method used to make the wine, is one of the most prevalent forms of wine adulteration. After then, the adulterated wine is marketed as the original product—typically a high-end brand—and sold as such. It also has to do with re-labelling wines, which involves putting the label of a more costly wine on a bottle of a less expensive one and putting it on the market as an original product.
Honey is subject to fraud by adulteration with low price sugar syrups. Saccharides in syrups derived from cane, corn or beet sugar are difficult to distinguish from those in pure honeys.
Cheese, yogurt, pickles, and other commonly consumed foods fall under the category of fermented foods. Adulteration of fermented foods can happen when the fermentation process is changed or when additives are added to the final product. Cheese can be adulterated with cellulose, starch, and other substances to increase its weight and volume. Additionally, adulterating cheese using plant-based oil can lower the cost of making it. Gelatin, pectin, and other adulterants could be added to yogurt to increase its weight and volume. Chemically produced flavors and sugar are frequently added to yoghurt to alter its palate.
Physical characteristics like refractive index, viscosity, melting point, saponification, and iodine value were employed to identify these Food Fraud a few decades ago. These days, they are outdated methods because the process of adulteration has developed and grown more complex. These continuous advances make the development of detection techniques a real challenge. A variety of cutting-edge methods have been developed to detect occurrences of food fraud.
– Kalyan Srinivas M
