Protecting our EU food integrity standards with cutting-edge technology

Are you actually getting the fish you paid for? How authentic is the honey on your breakfast table? 

The rise of fraudulent practices in the agri-food chain is a growing concern for both consumers and honest producers. 

In a new report, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) proposes to enhance the integrity of the EU food system, by integrating cutting-edge traceability technologies, digital innovations, and authenticity systems into existing safety standards. 

This initiative promises to benefit European citizens by ensuring the food they consume is safe, authentic, and of high quality. 

Centralising food fraud data

A substantial volume of food chain data is already accessible at European and international levels, enabling a shift towards a digital, risk-based approach to safeguarding the food system. However, these data sources are dispersed across various food businesses operators, competent authorities in Member States and Commission services, and unfortunately are not always interoperable. 

To protect European food system(s), we need to apply a more holistic approach and address suspicions and problems with advanced digital tools. 

The Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety launched a new innovative approach that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse vast amounts of data. These developments will help detecting irregularities that could point to fraud, integrate information related to agri-food fraud, generating early warning signals of potential fraud and assist in managing suspicious cases.

They include machine-learning models using past food fraud cases from the EU Food Fraud Network to explore predictive analytics for spotting potential fraud. The results will increase EU Member States interest to report all the agri-food fraud cases detected using the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed platform.   

The report also recommends the creation of:

• an independent data trust to facilitate the sharing of food fraud data between the food industry and authorities, incentivising industrial participation.
• a Public-Private Partnership to promote the adoption of interoperable digital traceability systems by food businesses, allowing data sharing with authorities as needed. 
• a well-defined technology roadmap for setting up an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven Information Technology system for food integrity, combining large data sets and analysing them with big data tools. This project will integrate the European Commission competences with relevant datasets, IT experts and data scientists.

Policy context

The Farm to Fork Strategy has recognised the necessity of intensifying efforts to combat fraudulent practices within the agri-food chain while simultaneously enhancing traceability and alert systems to improve coordination in addressing food fraud. 

The Council Conclusions underline that successful action to tackle food fraud should be based on rapid and effective exchanges of relevant information, appropriate reporting and close collaboration between authorities within Member States as well as between Member States and the Commission. 

Related links

An information-based risk analysis IT tool protecting the European food system(s)