More than €100 million worth of dangerous food and drinks seized

Photo by jonathan ocampo on Unsplash

Of all the counterfeited products sold worldwide, counterfeit food and drinks can be potentially dangerous to consume. A recent finding by Food Safety News claims that, in 2020, food items such as cookies, pasta, crisps, and sweets were the second most intercepted category at the EU external borders for counterfeit products.

An operation conducted by Europol’s Intellectual Property Crime Coordinated Coalition and INTERPOL named Operation OPSON seized over €100 million worth of dangerous food and drinks between December 2018 and April 2019.

Confiscating such a tremendously high worth of counterfeit food and drink items clearly indicates having to raise the alarms before it’s too late.

However, before taking action, it is prudent to know and measure the consequences these confiscated items would have caused from the below statistics from the Operation.

1. In total, some 16,000 tonnes of fake food and 33 million litres of potentially dangerous drinks were seized through the Operation.
2. Around 3,628 metric tonnes of cereals were confiscated as fake food items.
3. A concerning figure for such massive confiscations is about 1,136 metric tonnes of condiments found throughout the entire operation.
4. Around the same time, Customs from Lithuania seized 335,000 counterfeited sweet packages that were targeted to attract the attention of the most vulnerable food consumers — children.
5. More so, NAS Carabinieri seized over 150,000 litres of tampered food sunflower oil masked as extra virgin olive oil by adding chlorophyll and beta-carotene to the finished product.

As a brand, ensuring that these fake food items and any associated food fraud happening must not reach the end consumers is necessary. Therefore, it is vital for a brand, in coordination with logistics firms, to use new-age innovative technology like Countercheck to intercept incoming and outgoing counterfeit packages.