Food Authenticity Research and Surveillance Programmes (Q01 and Q02)

The Agency has a policy objective to ensure that consumers have clear and accurate information so that they can make informed choices about their diets and the food they buy. The rationale of both Q01 (Food Authenticity and Labelling Research) and Q02 (Food Authenticity and Labelling Surveillance) programmes lies with ensuring that the labelling and description of foods are accurate and not misleading. Both programmes contribute to the development of the Agency's policy on labelling by identifying where labelling needs to be made clearer or more understandable to consumers or where problems of misdescription are occurring. The problems may then be addressed through better vigilance by more targeted enforcement, by the national food industry improving its practices, or through improved guidance or ultimately by imposing new legislation.

To underpin and assist implementation of the Agency's objective of promoting honest and informative labelling to help consumers. To support the development of effective UK and EC labelling and compositional legislation or international standards such as Codex Alimentarius.

The programme will assist in the development of labelling policy by identifying where problems of misdescription are occurring or where labelling needs to be made clearer or more understandable to consumers. The problems may then be addressed through better vigilance by the national food industry, or by more targeted enforcement, or improved guidance or ultimately by imposing new legislation.

The programme covers a spectrum of activities and approaches:

1. Understanding of Consumer Concerns

The programme will link into the Agency's work in developing labelling policy in Europe, nationally and internationally (Codex Alimentarius), and support the “better labelling initiative” to make labelling clearer and easier to understand by consumers.

• by conducting qualitative and/or quantitative consumer research through focus groups or questionnaires;
• identification of issues through the WPFA, policy issues in food composition or vertical commodity legislation; and other consumer inputs into the Agency
• prioritisation of these concerns into policy requirements.

2. Application of Novel Technology

The main aim of the research is to identify unique markers or groups of markers that characterise the authenticity of foods or their potential adulterants, and use these to resolve qualitative or quantitative problems.

• markers can be identified and measured through a wide variety of cutting edge analytical techniques. Present work relies heavily on DNA based markers which are unique and survive processing in many cases. Other markers are based on unique proteins or peptides, stable isotope ratios or trace elements.
• database values of markers need to be created or extended to demonstrate their application to the food issue.
• novel technology may also be applied to improve existing methods or put them into a simpler format.

3. Validation of Methods

The main deliverable is an experimental protocol that takes into account the performance of the method, its robustness and applicability. This is achieved by:

• conducting further development projects and trials to determine the accuracy, precision and robustness of the method;
• conducting pilot studies to check new methodology when applied to different products or matrices;
• conducting ring trials or peer testing nationally or internationally.

4. Undertaking Surveys

The Working Party on Food Authenticity oversees the programme of work on surveys by:

• prioritising the authenticity issues being examined by surveys.
• Agreeing the protocols for robust methods of analysis, and their interpretation.
• Agreeing sampling protocols.
• Coordinating the collection and analysis of samples, and drafting the Information Sheets or reports to inform the public of the results.

In addition, surveys examining the labelling and descriptions of food, but without undertaking analysis may be carried out. These will focus on whether labelling guidelines or recommendations issued by the Agency are being adhered to. These surveys will be overseen by the staff with policy responsibility for this area.

5. Technology Transfer

It is important that new methods and novel technology are available not only for the Agency's use but also for enforcement and industry to use. Apart from the Agency's publicity and information service on the website to the public, which will release project and survey results, extra activities may be necessary to achieve technology transfer:

• Organisation of training sessions in particular techniques or methods.
• Organisation of trials using reference or spiked samples to test proficiency of laboratories.

1. The Agency has a primary policy objective to ensure that consumers have clear and accurate information so that they can make informed choices about their diets and the food they buy. The Agency is also pushing for improvements in food labelling through its work nationally, in Europe and internationally in ensuring that labelling is easier to understand and reflects the concerns of consumers. It is achieving these objectives either through changes in legislation, or compositional standards or by working with manufacturers and retailers to develop improvements, which can be taken forward on a voluntary basis.

2. At the heart of this programme lies the objective of ensuring that the labelling and description of food are accurate and not misleading. Food authenticity is a term that refers to whether the food purchased by the consumer matches its description. The term “description” is used for the information in the wider market covering not just prepacked foods, but non-prepacked foods and foods sold in catering or other establishments. The accuracy for such information is covered in general terms by Food Safety Act 1990 and the Trades Description Act 1968. However, the programme is focused on the specific information provided under the Food Labelling Regulations 1996 and a considerable raft of vertical legislation and standards dealing with the labelling and composition of specific foods. The issues investigated under the programme will covers the following:

Name of the food

• This may be a legal name i.e. name laid down in law. Such names are covered in vertical regulations or marketing regimes and include: chocolate, honey, sugars, fruit juices, fish names, some meat products, alcoholic drinks, olive oil, potato varieties.
• A name which describes the true nature of the food (customary names will normally not be investigated)

Other qualifying descriptions

• Geographic origin is increasingly given for foods and is one of the policy areas being pursued by the Agency to improve clarity and transparency of labelling . A few foods need to give their origin such as honey, and some foods have registered geographic denomination, but in most cases geographic origin is used as a quality qualification.
• Organically produced products are a growing market and have a price differential. It is important to be able to verify the claim by other means than auditing the production methods.
• Genetically modified organisms have also been important issue for labelling, and the testing of foods as well as ingredients is important.

Ingredients

• The name given to an ingredient is usually the same name as if it were sold on its own. Hence, the checking of names given to ingredients will follow a similar approach to the name of the food.
• Certain generic terms for ingredients have been defined in law such as 'meat', and other similar ingredients excluded such as 'offal' and 'mechanically recovered meat'.
• Some foods require a minimum amount of an ingredient before the legal name can be used, and this needs checking.

Quantitative Declarations

Some foods required a quantitative declaration of ingredients before February 2000 such as chocolate, jam, and meat products. After February 2000, most products will trigger a requirement for a quantitative declaration of the named or characterising ingredient. Verification of the declaration is important.

Processing descriptions

The need to inform the consumer about treatments is only necessary where the omission to do so misleads, and processes such as freezing and drying would fall in this category. However, certain processes are required to be labelled, eg irradiation.

Other forms of misdescription

In addition to the issues listed above, one of the main problems is the undeclared addition of water or other cheap materials to bulk out the food.

Other policy objectives

3. Ensuring that food is correctly described is the main objective of the programme. However, the programme covers descriptions that are required by both horizontal approach but also the vertical one, which is still an important aspect of European Community and international standards development. There is increasing rather than decreasing activity in Community’s agricultural and fisheries regimes for setting labelling requirements for specific commodities, and recent examples of fish labelling and olive oil illustrate this tendency. In addition, international standards such as Codex Alimentarius are playing an increasingly important role in harmonising world trade practices and protecting the consumer on an international level. The Programme supports policy development and negotiation on international and European rules on composition and labelling.

4. The Agency also needs to monitor the UK food supply to assess the degree of compliance of food with legislation on the UK market. This enables it to identify any areas of existing legislation that need strengthening, and also give a measure of performance of enforcement authorities and compliance by industry, and helps to prevent unfair competition from the unscrupulous trader. Concentration on the problem areas should be in proportion to those sectors of the food industry with high value products such as meat and meat products (£9 billion), fish and fish products (£3.5 billion), fruit juices (£1 billion), fats and oils (£0.5 billion).

5. The Programme should also address and resolve specific problems of misdescription for minority groups where certain foods form an important part of the diet, e.g. to verify the claim 'halal', 'kosher'; and the adulteration of Basmati rice. It should also address the needs of disdvantaged consumers where misdescription and adulteration more often occur at the lower quality and price end of the market.

6. Improvement of labelling needs to be more closely linked with research to find out whether the consumer understands the information he or she is receiving. Therefore surveys which determine consumer understanding, attitudes and concerns on labelling and composition issues will form an important part of influencing the policy development in this area. A coherent programme, which addresses these policy needs, is therefore essential to the Agency’s aims and objectives.

Added Value

7. The current food authenticity research programme has run from 1993 and gained special recognition, both nationally and internationally, for focussing and co-ordinating food authenticity research for consumer protection. It has been able to harness new technology to resolve difficult issues of misdescription. In particular, the rapid development of DNA-based techniques in other research areas such as medicine, genetics and agriculture have been applied to food authenticity with some success. It is envisaged that this process will continue as technology is moving forward very quickly. Similarly, the origin of foods has been made easier by the rapid development in analytical chemistry to determine isotopic ratios and trace elements. The investigation of novel analytical techniques will contribute the overall science base of the UK and the EU and may well provide ideas and methods that can be utilised by other research programmes within the Agency. The use of the developed techniques by other outside the Agency, whether industry or enforcement laboratories, will contribute to accurate labelling of the food supply and the prevention of misdescription or fraud.

8. Increasingly, the development of methods and resolving problems of misdescription is recognised as a pan-European exercise under framework funding. The programme has funded and will continue to fund a proportion of projects, which receive European Community funding. These have been shown to be good value in giving results from many collaborating parties from several countries in looking at foods which are produced nationally, especially for products of designated origin and geographical indication. EC Concerted Actions and networks are also an area of increasing collaboration with European counterparts in food authenticity. All of these draw heavily from the achievements of current authenticity R&D programme and will continue to do so as the programme has been recognised as a leading one in Europe.

Name: Mark Woolfe
Tel: 020 7276 8176 (Intl. +44 (0) 20 7276 8176)
Email: mark.woolfe@foodstandards.gsi.gov.uk