FOOD FRAUD PREVENTION- IMPLEMENTING VACCP & TACCP PART (i)

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Food fraud is an emerging food safety threat that involves the deliberate and intentional substitution, addition, tampering, or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients, or food packaging; or false or misleading statements made about a product, for economic gain. Any of these incidences in the food supply chain can not only be dangerous to customers but can prove costly in terms of company reputation, financial penalties and shareholder value. Therefore, producers, manufacturers, handlers or suppliers of ingredients and food need to assure the customers that their products are safe and free from contamination that may arise from food fraud.  

VACCP (Vulnerability Assessment Critical Control Point) is the management process to defend a food supply chain from any form of dishonest conduct that impacts detrimentally on the quality or authenticity of food and drinks. It focuses on food fraud as well, and widens the scope to include systematic prevention of any potential adulteration of food, whether intentional or not, by identifying the vulnerable points in a supply chain. It is especially concerned with economically motivated adulterations (EMA) that include product substitutions, unapproved product enhancements, counterfeiting, stolen goods and others.

TACCP (Threat Assessment Critical Control Point) is the management process to defend a food supply chain from intentional contamination. It focuses on prevention of malicious threats to food, such as sabotage, extortion, tampering, intentional adulteration of food, and food defence from bio-terrorism.

The above tools are similar to HACCP and HAPRC. VACCP and TACCP address threats and vulnerabilities through intentional contamination. HACCP addresses control hazards through unintentional contamination while HARPC (Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Control) is an extension to the HACCP system that focuses on preventive control. HARPC plan aims to prevent the hazards occurring in the first place.

NOTE: HARPC includes hazards such as vulnerabilities and threats as explained in previous sections.

To prevent food fraud, from Extortion, Malicious Contamination, Cybercrime, Espionage, Economically motivated adulteration and Counterfeiting PAS 96: 2014 is applied.  The standard is intended for use by all organizations involved in the food and agri-food sector. The following sectors can apply the standard:

• Businesses who run in a competitive space in the market to ensure that their competitors cannot sabotage their reputation
• Organizations who operate in areas with very little legal protection
• Businesses with large, varied and widely-sourced supply chains

ADVANTAGES OF TACCP & VACCP

• Demonstrate your commitment to food safety
• Reduce the likelihood of a deliberate attack
•  Reduce the impact of an attack on your food business
• Reassure stakeholders about the safety of your production and supply chain
• Enhance your brand reputation
• Better management of risks, both now and in the future

Food businesses need to assess any specific threats to their business from intentional contamination, either from rogue employees at one end of a spectrum to pressure groups, ideologically motivated individuals and terrorists at the other end through their vulnerability to such an attack and specifically ‘know their people’ - staff, contractors, cleaners and visitors. Notwithstanding advising a proportionate response, an existing HACCP team with the addition of Human Resource and site security representatives to manage ‘physical site security and people’ is essential.

2.0 DESIGNING A TACCP/VACCP SYSTEM

The following questions can be used by the TACCP team in designing the system;

• Who might want to attack us?
• How might they do it?
• Where are we vulnerable?
• How can we stop them?

Figure 1.0: Sample TACCP implementation Diagram