Pathologies in the Food Market
Food crimes can be intentional, where food is deliberately adulterated for financial gain, or accidental, often arising from negligence (e.g., failure to follow health and safety regulations, good manufacturing practices, food laws, or through product mislabeling).
The consequences of such pathologies primarily lead to a reduction in food quality, significantly impacting human health and safety. Additionally, this fosters distrust in both producers and food safety authorities.
From a business perspective, such acts harm competition or may even constitute sabotage. By adulterating products – either by adding undeclared ingredients or substituting valuable ones with cheaper alternatives – dishonest entrepreneurs reduce production costs, which distorts fair competition within the food sector.
Alarming Figures
Consumers expect the food they purchase to be safe and produced using raw materials that meet the highest quality standards. According to the WHO, each year around 600 million people fall ill due to consuming contaminated food. Tragically, this results in 420,000 deaths annually [Food safety, 2022]. A 2006 WHO report estimated that 1.8 million people die each year due to diarrheal diseases, with the majority of cases linked to contaminated food or water [WHO, 2006].
Food Control
Ensuring food safety and compliance with food laws is the responsibility of official food control authorities. In Poland, food undergoes both internal and external control systems. Internal control, which is the responsibility of producers, is conducted within establishments and follows the Principles of Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), Good Hygienic Practice (GHP), and the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) system. External control bodies include the State Sanitary Inspection, Veterinary Inspection, Agricultural and Food Quality Inspection, Commercial Inspection, and the State Plant and Seed Protection Inspection.
The numerous specialized bodies and complex organizational structures often result in overlapping inspections, unclear jurisdiction, and interpretive challenges. This fragmentation leads to a lack of a comprehensive approach to inspections and poor information flow between agencies.
Poland’s accession to the European Union required food producers to comply with the EU's food safety system, which is based on Regulation (EC) No. 178/2002. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and its food safety procedures play a central role in this system.
European Alert System
The Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) was created to facilitate the exchange of information among European control authorities. This system allows authorities to share information about hazards in food, feed, and food contact materials. Member countries are required to immediately report any detected hazards, enabling swift actions such as product recalls, public warnings, and inspections.
Figure 1 illustrates the number of notifications submitted to the RASFF system between 2018 and 2022 (in green), with food-related notifications in blue. As shown, nearly all alerts concern potentially hazardous food products. These figures were compiled from annual reports available on the RASFF System and Alert and Cooperation Network (ACN) websites.
Despite existing regulations, official reports continue to highlight incidents of food adulteration, mislabeling, deliberate imitation of products, copying product characteristics, and the misuse of terms like ‘natural’ or ‘traditional’. Figure 2 presents the percentage of RASFF notifications from 2018 to 2022, primarily related to mislabeling, improper documentation, product adulteration, and violations in the manufacturing process.
Product Authenticity Testing
Food adulteration poses risks to health, the economy, society, and the environment. The European Commission estimates the annual economic cost of food fraud to be between 30 and 40 billion euro [RASFF, 2020]. This underscores the need for reliable analytical methods to protect human health, ensuring food safety. In practice, finding a universal method to eliminate substandard or counterfeit products from the market is challenging.
Chemical Fingerprints
The authenticity of food products depends on their chemical composition, which is why spectroscopic and chromatographic methods are used to analyze substances in samples – these act as chemical fingerprints. Spectroscopic methods are simple, fast, non-destructive, and can be automated. When combined with chromatography, they offer an ideal tool for routine food inspections.
Improvements in sample dispensing systems, the development of chromatographic columns, and the variety of detectors have significantly reduced analysis time while maintaining effective separation of ingredients.
Among the techniques for detecting food adulteration, those based on stable isotope analysis are particularly noteworthy. These methods precisely determine the isotopic composition of a product, which helps establish its geographical and botanical origin. They are especially useful for analyzing products such as alcohol, juice, honey, garlic, and spices. In the case of pharmaceuticals, they can identify the synthetic pathway, which helps detect adulteration and patent violations.
Research at TUL
At the TUL Faculty of Chemistry, Institute of Organic Chemistry, research is underway in the field of food and alcohol authentication, particularly for products obtained through the fermentation of various raw materials [Ciepielowski et al., 2025; Pacholczyk-Sienicka et al., 2024]. As part of the ongoing Miniatura 8 project, a protocol is being developed to detect adulteration in edible fats using NMR measurements combined with GC-MS and LC-MS techniques. The aim is to create statistical models capable of differentiating between samples and estimating the degree of adulteration.
Reference list:
Ciepielowski, G, Krassowski, J., Albrecht, L., Pacholczyk-Sienicka, B. Identifying the Botanical Origin of Alcohol Using 2H SNIF NMR: A Case Study of “Polish Vodka” PGI. Food Chemistry, 463, 141218, 2025.
Pacholczyk-Sienicka, B., Modranka, J., Ciepielowski, G. Comparative analysis of bioactive compounds in garlic owing to the cultivar and origin. Food Chemistry, 2024, 439, 138141.
Food safety. (2022). Retrieved from Food safety (who.int). WHO (2006). Five Keys to safer food manual. Geneva: World Health Organization 2006.
