I’ve covered food fraud in the pages of FE a number of times over the years, and one 2016 article entitled, “VACCP: HACCP for vulnerability assessments,” still draws on average 750 page views per month. Needless to say, discerning consumers are aware of some of the typical frauds that present themselves at the store: fake honey, olive oil containing cheaper vegetable oils, fake pomegranate juice, seafood imposters at a restaurant—and who could forget the melamine crisis of a few years ago?
Severin Weiss, CEO of SpecPage and an expert in integrated software process solutions for recipe-based food and beverage processors, thinks PLM (product lifecycle management) and PDM (product data management) are two sets of tools that can help food processors avoid using fraudulent ingredients from less-than-scrupulous suppliers. Of course, there’s no substitute for some lab tests to verify that the ingredient is what the supplier’s COA says it is.