¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

Last September, Flavor Fresh Foods of Chicago pleaded guilty to defrauding
consumers of more than $40 million by selling what it claimed was 100 per
cent pure orange juice, but in fact was nothing of the kind. The fraud was
elaborate. First, a Michigan-based company, Peninsular Products, shipped
the juice from Brazil to a Canadian company which added sugar. The juice
was sent on to Flavor Fresh Foods, which diluted it with a cheap, bitter
by-product of squeezed oranges called pulpwash. To try to cover the adulteration,
Flavor Fresh also added citric acid and amino acids that occur naturally
in juice. The juice then went back to Peninsular, which added more orange
juice, more pulpwash and a preservative. Flavor Fresh and Peninsular then
sold the adulterated juice to customers that included hospitals, nursing
homes and schools. For his role in the affair, the owner of Flavor Fresh,
James R. Marshall, was fined $125 000 and sentenced to more than three
years in prison.

Fruit juices are big business. In Britain alone some £800 million
worth are sold each year and in the US the annual market is worth $12 billion
( £7.5 billion). In a survey published in 1991, Britain’s Ministry
of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (MAFF) found that 16 out of 21 leading
brands of orange juice sold in Britain contained added substances such
as beet sugar that should not have been there. Officials in the US estimate
that fraudulent products account for ten per cent of the market there.

Manufacturers who use the term ‘orange juice’ must extract the product
from the fleshy parts of an orange but are allowed to process the juice
in certain ways. For example: they can concentrate it by evaporation before
shipping it round the world, adding water at its destination. But this practice
must be acknowledged with a phrase such as ‘made from concentrate’. The
law says the labels on juice must not mislead.

The incentive for fraud is clear. According to Allan Brause who runs
Analytical Chemical Services, a private food testing laboratory in Columbia,
Maryland, orange juice made from 100 per cent juice solids is about 20
per cent more expensive than that made from 70 per cent juice solids, 15
per cent beet sugar and 15 per cent pulpwash, for example. Substituting
adulterated juice for the real thing boosts profits for some juice companies,
which generally rely on tiny margins.

‘Food fraud is a very lucrative business,’ says Martin Stutsman of the
US Food and Drug Administration. Since 1986, the FDA has successfully prosecuted
almost a dozen juice companies for fraud. Its investigations make use of
tip-offs from employees as well as the expertise of food chemists, who use
a battery of advanced techniques, such as mass spectroscopy and chromatography.
Food fraud has evolved from a crude con trick into a sophisticated science.
This can make fraud difficult to spot, and Stutsman says the large sums
involved allow companies to go to great lengths to cover their tracks.

Fraud raises serious public health concerns, and not only when it concerns
fruit juices. In 1985, health authorities in Vienna impounded Austrian white
wine found to have been adulterated with diethylene glycol, which can cause
kidney failure and death. The quality of a wine is partly judged on the
way it clings to a glass as it is swirled round. Producers added the chemical
to make the wine more viscous so that it would produce a thicker film around
the glass, and so fetch a higher price. Some fifty people were jailed or
fined for their involvement in the fraud. The authorities said the quantities
involved were too small to be dangerous, but Austria’s wine exports have
never recovered. In 1991, they were less than half their 1984 levels.

Health risk

Natural toxins are also a health risk. A 1993 FDA survey of fresh and
frozen concentrated apple juices found that a quarter of them had levels
of a natural toxin called patulin that were above WHO recommendations. Patulin
is produced in rotten apples and its presence in apple juice implies that
producers have used mouldy apples which are, obviously, cheaper than fresh
ones. Patulin is an organic chemical produced by mould that can act like
an antibiotic and an immunosuppressant. It is known to make antibiotic treatments
less effective, especially in children, and the FDA is investigating what
other risks ingesting patulin might involve.

In the battle against food fraud, consumer protection officials on both
sides of the Atlantic are turning to advanced analytical methods. One of
these techniques is mass spectroscopy which can measure the ratio of two
oxygen isotopes, oxygen-16 and oxygen-18, in fruit juice. The heavier isotope,
which accounts for about 0.2 per cent of all oxygen, becomes slightly more
concentrated in water in growing plants because the heavier isotope is
less likely to evaporate. Consequently, oxygen-18 is more abundant in pure
juice than in water from nonbiological sources, and juice diluted with
water will have a lower concentration of oxygen-18 than the real thing.

But there are ways to beat the test. Ed Bodine, the owner of US juice
company, Bodine Juice, was jailed for two years and fined $200 000 in 1987
for selling millions of dollars’ worth of orange juice doctored with beet
sugar, pulpwash and grapefruit juice, which is cheaper than orange. During
the investigation, which began in 1978, FDA officials discovered paperwork
that proved Bodine had gone to elaborate lengths to beat the oxygen-18 test.
Instead of using tap water to dilute the juice, he added water that had
been distilled and so produced an oxygen-18 signature closer to that of
pure juice. The most readily available source was treated sewer water from
his local water treatment plant.

Mass spectroscopy can also measure the relative amounts of carbon-12
and carbon-13 in samples of food and drink. The heavier isotope naturally
accounts for about one per cent of carbon atoms in the environment and so
finds its way into things we eat. But the amount varies from plant to plant
because different metabolic processes favour one isotope over the other.
For example, the ratio of carbon isotopes in sugar (sucrose) from cane
or corn is different to the ratio in sucrose derived from grapes. If these
sugars have been added to wine to boost its alcohol content during fermentation,
mass spectroscopy can spot the adulteration.

But again the test can be beaten. The metabolic process that produces
sugar in beet, apples and barley is the same as in grapes, so sugar from
these sources has identical isotopic signatures. If beet sugar, for example,
is added to wine, mass spectroscopy will not find it.

The food chemist’s arsenal also includes chromatography, a commonly
used test which separates mixtures of gases, liquids or dissolved substances.
Chromatography can show, for example, that pure apple juice contains certain
ratios of fructose, glucose and sucrose. If companies dilute the juice they
must add sugar to improve its taste – an illegal practice if the juice is
sold as unadulterated. Cane and beet sugar contain only sucrose. Using these
as sweeteners changes the overall ratio of sugars and a simple chromatographic
test will uncover the deception. But companies involved in fraud can beat
the test if they add high fructose syrup made from corn, which has the same
ratio of sugars as apple juice.

Foolproof test

Food chemists can also exploit the fact that fruit grown in different
regions contain characteristic quantities of chemicals known as flavonoids
and polyphenolics, which are also responsible for their flavour and colour.
Chromatography can separate these chemicals, providing evidence of the origin
of the fruit. Using this technique, it is possible to tell a juice from
Florida, which Americans prefer, from a cheaper import.

One technique which fraudsters cannot yet fool is called site-specific
natural isotope fractionation by nuclear magnetic resonance, or SNIF-NMR.
This method works by measuring the amount of deuterium, the stable heavy
isotope of hydrogen, in molecules taken from a sample. When bathed in a
strong magnetic field, deuterium nuclei absorb radio waves at a well-defined
frequency, which is influenced quite markedly by nearby atoms. So a deuterium
atom joined to a carbon atom which is in turn joined to an oxygen atom
produces a signal at a different frequency to one for which there is no
oxygen atom nearby. The more often deuterium is present at a particular
site in the molecule, the stronger will be the signal for that site.

Armed with this information, scientists can draw an isotopic map of
the molecule showing the sites within the molecule where there are most
deuterium atoms. The positions are important because they are determined
by the isotope ratios in the chemicals from which the molecules are derived
and the process by which they were created. The ethanol in wine fermented
from grape sugar has a different isotopic map from ethanol produced by sugar
from beet or any other source. Chemists can use these maps to determine
whether the wine has been tampered with. The same technique can map the
molecules used as flavourings, and SNIF-NMR is now being used to crack down
on fraud in the $2.7 billion global food flavour business.

One of the most widely sold flavourings is vanilla, which forms naturally
in pods grown on certain tropical climbing orchids. Yves Teisseyre, a vanilla
importer based in Grasse in southern France, who is a member of the European
Vanilla Trade Union, estimates that for every kilogram of real vanilla,
25 kilograms of a synthetic version are produced. A significant proportion
of this, he says, is used in products that purport to contain ‘natural’
vanilla.

Top-quality vanilla extract, which contains the organic chemical vanillin
responsible for the flavour, sells for about 250 times the price of synthetic
vanillin. ‘People pay the extra price in the mistaken belief that natural
vanilla extract is somehow better,’ says Jack Knights, technical director
of the flavour producer Tastemaker based in Milton Keynes. There is no difference
in molecular structure or taste, so the opportunity for fraud is huge. According
to Teisseyre, the French food industry would need ten times as many vanilla
pods as it actually imports to account for all the ‘natural’ vanilla that
companies claim is in milk products alone. Food chemists working for vanilla
traders have even discovered vanilla pods in which all the vanillin is synthetic,
the natural material having been removed.

SNIF-NMR can detect the difference because synthetic molecules do not
have the same isotopic map as the natural variety. The molecules can be
doctored to beat mass spectroscopy tests – for example, by replacing groups
of atoms on the molecule with groups of the same structure containing carbon-13.
But SNIF-NMR would not be fooled, because in molecules of natural vanillin
heavy isotopes are distributed throughout their structure, not just in one
place. In theory, molecules that have the same isotopic map as the natural
variety, and that would fool SNIF-NMR, can be manufactured synthetically.
But the cost is so high that it is not worth fraudsters’ while.

Gilles Martin of Eurofins, a private food chemistry laboratory in Nantes,
western France, which developed SNIF-NMR, says his company has found significant
amounts of fraudulent products in every type of food and drink it has examined
since the company was founded in 1985. In a survey of Beaujolais wines four
years ago, for instance, Eurofins found that up to half the alcohol in some
wines was fermented from added sugars.

To combat counterfeit wines and spirits, food scientists are working
to perfect other techniques to determine in which country and region they
were produced. ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs at the Institute of Viticulture in Germany say
they have isolated 15 aroma compounds in muscat wine which can be used to
identify where it was grown. The concentration of these compounds varies
according to the combination of climate and soil, which is generally unique
to each wine-growing region. For example, a simple chromatographic test
on filter papers can tell true Riesling wine from wines made from other
grapes.

Authentic samples

British scientists have used similar methods to isolate just six compounds
that can be used to distinguish between Scotch whiskies and cheap foreign
imports. John Piggot at the Centre for Food Quality at the University of
Strathclyde says that the method provides enough evidence for prosecution
for fraud but has never been tested in court because the people accused
of it have always pleaded guilty.

Before a wine can be identified as suspect there has to be an authentic
sample to compare it with. The European Commission began building a database
of wine samples in 1991 specifically to act as a library for fraud investigators
in the wine industry. At the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission
in Ispra, Italy, scientists are collecting hundreds of bottles each year
and analysing them using chromatography and SNIF-NMR. However there is not
yet a database for wines produced earlier.

Researchers at a government laboratory in Bordeaux have managed to link
wines to their region of origin by measuring the amount of rare earth elements
such as lanthanum, cerium and praseodymium that they contain. Even the age
of the wine can be found, using carbon dating techniques. Both of these
methods are still at the experimental stage and databases of authentic samples
will have to be available before they can be used to monitor fraud.

In the meantime, what can be done to protect consumers? At the FDA,
Stutsman says stiff fines, prison sentences and bad publicity seem to be
having the desired effect on food fraudsters in the US. But in Europe, legal
cases have so far been scarce. The MAFF in Britain believes that the fruit
juice industry has begun to regulate itself. MAFF’s follow-up survey of
orange juices five months after the one it carried out in 1991 recorded
a marked improvement: from samples of 98 juices it was unable to spot adulteration
in 91. MAFF says this shows that the industry is coming into line.

But some local trading standards officers tell a different story. In
January, the trading standards authority for West Yorkshire prosecuted the
Surrey-based firm Olympian Gold International for falsely claiming it was
selling pure orange juice. The company had imported juice from the Greek
company Ulysses B. Balis that contained added beet sugar and D-malic acid,
which is responsible for the tartness in real juice. In the first successful
case of its kind in Britain, Bradford magistrates fined Olympian £9000
and ordered it to pay £8000 costs. Keith Hurley, director of the
trading standards authority that brought the case believes it has sent out
a warning that, at long last, British food fraud investigators mean business.

Both Martin and Brause say that the official food chemists currently
have the upper hand in the food fraud war. But they point out that this
is only because many of the chemical methods that can mask food fraud are
too expensive for most fraudsters, and Martin is not optimistic about the
future. ‘Unfortunately,’ he says, ‘a bent chemist can beat almost any test
for fraud.’