Food Quality Magazine
ISSUE 02 | AUTUMN 2014
Information Technology and
Preventing Food Fraud
There are five primary things that
the information technology component of an effective food fraud prevention system can provide. As
depicted in Figure 1, below, through
the application of information technology, we can: 1) harvest real world
food fraud incidents from open sources on the World Wide Web; 2)
“reverse engineer” food fraud incidents to determine the means and
methods actually being used by the
perpetrators of food fraud by both
commodity type and location along
the food supply chain; 3) determine
how effective prevention and response actions are by looking at
their effectiveness in preventing and
responding to real world incidents
of food fraud; 4) build computer
software tools that make food fraud
assessment easy, highly effective
and cheaper than current methods,
and; 5) harvest intelligence from the
World Wide Web to provide the
“actionable intelligence” needed to
prevent and, when necessary, impro-
ve responses to food fraud incidents.
Once you have harvested, reduced,
filtered, structured and validated food incident data, the next challenge
is to use it. Among the computer analytics that can be applied to
the data include the identification
of food safety, food defense (including food fraud) means, methods
and associated countermeasures,
the statistical derivation of the risk
reduction value of different countermeasures, the development of
forensically derived sampling plans,
the motivation, planning and required knowledge of adversaries,
lessons learned from past similar
events, degree of consequence for
related and unrelated events and
the best response actions to tak H[