Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, the pan-European police intelligence organisation, has called fake food “a major new part of the underground economy”.
Fake food pedalled by organised criminal gangs that could be harming children and people who suffer from allergies is being sold across Europe, it has been reported.
It is believed drug gangs have moved to counterfeiting food as the penalties are far lower than those for narcotic-related crime.
Products seized in the UK recently include goat’s milk diluted with cow’s milk, and cheaper peanut powder used instead of almond flour, which could seriously harm people with allergies.
Other illegal products include children’s sweets containing the carcinogenic industrial red dye Rhodamine B, 17,156 litres of fake vodka found in a 40ft lorry, and 22 tons of long-grain rice to be sold as high-quality basmati.
The findings follow the horse meat scandal last year, when horse DNA was found in meat labelled as beef, and was partly blamed on a difficult-to-trace chain of factories across Europe.
Huw Watkins, head of the intelligence hub at the Government’s Intellectual Property Office and who formerly worked to fight human trafficking, told The Sunday Times: “Food fraud — in a similar way to tackling human trafficking — requires us to collaborate across borders, so we are working with the Food Standards Agency (FSA), Interpol and Europol.
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