Sterling Crew, who is also technical director at crisp manufacturer Kolak Foods, told the IFST’s Jubilee conference last week that if criminals understood the risks of killing or injuring people they would not commit the crime in the first place.
“The people that adulterated products [such as the melamine in milk scandal in China] weren’t doing it to kill people,” he added. “I think if they knew that they were going to kill people, or injure people by adulteration, I don’t think they would have done it. They were criminals, but they weren’t criminals with a food safety culture.”
‘Lack of knowledge’
“With Sudan 1, the biggest recall we’ve ever had in the UK, I understand why people did it, because it made the product look a lot better,” he said. “I don’t think those people ever thought hang on a minute this could be toxic, there was a lack of knowledge and a lack of behaviour saying ‘let’s try and find something that’s at least safe’.”
In the case of Sudan 1, in 2005 an illegal food dye was discovered in batches of Worcester sauce supplied by Premier Foods.
Crew called on a health and safety culture throughout food businesses to prevent food safety incidents occurring in the future.
It made sense for criminals to target the food industry as there is a lot of money to be made from adulterating food products, he claimed
“Food manufacturing is the biggest industry in this country, one in six people in manufacturing work in our industry and it is worth something like £45bn,” Crew claimed. “There’s a lot of money splashing around there and it’s not surprising, maybe in hindsight if you’re a criminal why would you not target the biggest industry in the country? Why would you concentrate on other industries?”
Professor Tony Hines, head of corporate services and crisis management at Leatherhead Food Research, said there was so much money that could be made so easily under the radar; criminals were almost stupid not to do it.
Organised crime
“Is this [food fraud] a small thing or is it organised crime, or it is somewhere in between?” he asked. “Just about any commodity can be made to mislead. Most food business operators have not chosen crime as a profession and many did not understand [before the horsemeat crisis] their exposure to fraud.”
Food fraudsters were very clever and hard to detect and work needed to be done to make the UK a very uncomfortable place to commit food fraud, Hines claimed.
“We can predict food fraud, it could be happening right now, in one batch or one day or one week or it could be an ongoing long-term issue, so we don’t really know how long horsemeat was going into products for,” he added.
Hines called on food and drink business to share intelligence with each other to help prevent future cases of fraud.
Meanwhile, the Food Manufacture Group will be holding a one-day food safety conference on October 15 in Warwickshire.