The shocking investigation into food labels
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When you browse the supermarket shelves, you tend to trust what's written on the tin. When it says an ingredient has been sourced from Australia, why wouldn't you believe it? Today, Adele Ferguson on her exclusive Four Corners investigation into the food fraud that will shock you. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Adele, for the past eight months, you have been incredibly busy because you've been working with a team of forensic scientists to establish whether some of the most common products that we buy for our pantries every week are what they say they are.
Yes, that's right. We went into this investigation with the question, how do we really know what's in the food you're eating? where it's grown, what it contains, and really, is the label telling the truth when we're buying this product? So we teamed up with some forensic scientists to test some products and find out what's really going on.
So tell me about this forensic lab that you worked with, Source Certain.
Yes, so Source Certain, globally recognised. They've worked with global media outlets such as the BBC and also with the FBI, Scotland Yard, Interpol and more locally with state governments and the Australian Federal Police. So they have a really good track record and they have been doing this for decades and they've really honed in on what's going on.
And the forensic scientist you worked with, Cameron Scadding, He has a lot of experience in this space, just to note that.
He does. He has more than two decades in this space. How confident are you that you could find food fraud on a supermarket shelf?
Very confident. If you walk into a supermarket, there's opportunity in every one of those aisles for there to be misrepresentation.
Well, Adele, let's rip this band-aid off then, shall we? Yes. Let's start with tomatoes because as Australians, we consume 24 kilograms of processed tomato products every year. That's about a tin a week. So tell me, what did you look at?
Yeah, so we did a really big test of tomato products. We looked at 39 brands and more than 200 products were tested. And of them, there were 900 individual verifications. So it was a huge project. And what we found was one in four products that we picked off the shelf that were tomato paste and or some Posada either failed or were subject to some further investigation, which indicates it hasn't come from the origin that is claimed. Wow.
Okay, but hang on, just before we move on, how does Cameron Scadding and his team at Source Certain actually test this?
So it's actually very interesting looking at origin testing. So you have to think of it like a fingerprint. Food that's grown in the ground absorbs tiny amounts of naturally occurring elements from the soil, the water and the climate. So what Source Certain do is they measure more than 70 of those elements and they create a chemical fingerprint and then compare it with a database of verified samples from around the world to see whether the claimed origin stacks up. And the technical term for what they're doing is trace element analysis.
The metals that are in there, it tells us whereabouts it's been grown. So if you compare Italy to China in this example, the metals that end up in the tomatoes are different if they're from Italy as opposed to China. And so what we measure is we measure those and then we come up with the finding as to whether it's Italian or Chinese.
There's been a lot of peer group reviews done of this.
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