The U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention, a global health organization, has expanded its food-fraud database to give food manufacturers a more holistic picture of fraud and help them detect patterns of abuse over time, according to Feedstuffs.
“Substances used to adulterate food can include industrial dyes, plasticizers, allergens or other substances not intended to be consumed by people,” noted Dr. Jeffrey Moore, science director for the food program at USP. “Smart mitigation of risks starts with reliable data, and (FFD 2.0) is a first good step towards assessing the hazards potentially present in specific food supply chains.”
Food fraud costs industry an estimated $10-15 billion annually and affects as much as 10 percent of the global food supply, says Feedstuffs.
The USP database is considered the largest trove of food-fraud records in the world. The update “includes not only thousands of ingredients and related adulterants but also incident reports, surveillance records and analytical methods gathered from scientific literature, media publications, regulatory records, judicial records and trade associations around the world.” Users can customize their database dashboards to help them detect “historical trends and vulnerabilities.”