Food Forensics in partnership with Synergy Petfood offers petfood manufacturers and ingredient suppliers a portfolio of services that enable you to carry out a vulnerability assessment enabling risks to be prioritised and testing carried out to demonstrate control against fraud in “High” risk ingredients.
We help maintain your vulnerability assessment effectiveness by keeping you updated through our knowledge base, horizon scanning and information newsletters. Our active management services also enable effective budgetary control by testing ingredients based on risk, enabling you to control the risks and use your budget efficiently. All are designed to help you protect your business, our pets and maintain trust.
To meet pet owner demands around petfood humanisation and premiumisation, petfood manufacturers often use materials where specific claims are made. These often relate to authenticity, species, method of production and geographical origin. Due to the nature of these ingredients and the premium prices paid for them, this increases the motivation of criminals to commit food fraud through adulteration and substitution, putting the petfood producer at increased risk and wasting money.
Examples of petfood ingredients where these types of claims are made include: -
Food fraud increases the risk that the claims made for your products will not be substantiated e.g., “Scottish salmon” where the ingredients used are not authentic due to substitution or adulteration. Food fraud also means that you might be paying for a “premium” product e.g., “Organic” where the product is actually “standard” grade.
Another undesirable effect of food fraud is the possibility of food safety failure, for example as seen with melamine contamination of wheat gluten used in petfood in 2007 – 2008. This does not happen in every case, but the risk of food safety failure is a possibility.
As a petfood producer or ingredient supplier, it is important to protect your brands and business against potential legal action and loss of trust due the effects of food fraud.
