USP Introduces Tool to Assess Food Fraud Vulnerabilities

ROCKVILLE, Md.—The U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) pre-released a new tool to help assess vulnerabilities for economically-motivated fraudulent adulteration of food ingredients (EMA). This guidance document offers a framework for the food industry and regulators to develop and implement preventive management systems to deal specifically with EMA.

“The aim of this guidance is to provide a tool to assist manufacturers and regulators in how to identify the most fraud vulnerable ingredients in their supply chains and how to choose effective mitigation tools to combat EMA," said Jeff Moore, Ph.D., senior scientific liaison at USP. “The real challenge in preventing EMA is its unpredictable nature, and our guidance represents a leap forward in overcoming this hurdle. The output from implementing this tool provides users with a basis for making informed, vulnerability-based decisions on how to deal with EMA within their organizations."

The guidance document, titled “Guidance on Food Fraud Mitigation," was designed to be generally applicable to any food ingredient, and any food fraud management system that can be developed from this framework should be viewed as a dynamic and continuous process, involving characterization of food fraud vulnerabilities, contributing factors and impacts assessments, followed by design and review of a mitigation strategy and its implementation.

The guidance provides a comprehensive step-wise approach for preventing EMA at the ingredient level.  It allows individual assessment of all the indicators and factors known to contribute to fraud vulnerabilities and impacts, as well as qualitative tools to make sense of the results. Contributing factors included in the tool go beyond fraud history and include economic and geopolitical anomalies, audit strategies, and supply chain and supplier characteristics.

Impact assessments are used in the guidance to characterize the potential consequences of EMA when it does occur by using a framework that separates out food safety and economic impacts – an important consideration for organizations that have different risk tolerances. The guidance also provides illustrative examples and publicly available information resources for carrying out vulnerability assessments, including the USP Food Fraud Database, launched in 2012. 

Together, the overall vulnerability assessment should provide a more complete picture to users to guide the development of a mitigation strategy that reallocates resources to the most vulnerable ingredients and/or gaps in their food supply chains.

USP is a scientific nonprofit organization that establishes standards for the identity, strength, quality and purity of medicines, food ingredients and dietary supplements manufactured, distributed and consumed worldwide through its public monographs. Earlier this year, INSIDER talked to USP's Gabriel Giancaspro, Ph.D., vice president of foods, dietary supplements and herbal medicines about its monographs and the implications they have in the supplement industry.