Is olive oil indeed “extra virgin” or of lesser quality? And is beef meat indeed beef or eventually mixed with horse meat? From Wednesday, 5th of November, to Friday, 7th of November, 2025, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Regional Identity (BMLEH) and the National Reference Centre for Authentic Food (NRZ-Authent) of the Max Rubner-Institut (MRI) hosted an international conference in Berlin aiming to strengthen the fight against food fraud and to enhance collaboration amongst the competent authorities in Germany, Europe and at international level. The conference was streamed live to a global audience, bringing together 140 on-site and 160 remote participants, respectively, and translation services were available throughout.
Federal Minister Alois Rainer greeted the delegates, stating “The more complex the times, the greater the incentives for fraudsters”, and emphasised the strong intention of the German government “to protect our consumers in the best possible way against fraud”. Recalling the horse meat and melamine scandals as two particularly severe instances of food fraud, he invited the participants from over 50 countries to leverage of this conference for collaborative work on solutions. Following the welcome of Alois Rainer, Tanja Schwerdtle (President of the MRI), Ilka Haase (Head of the NRZ-Authent) and Koen van Dyck (DG Santé, Unit G.5) also greeted the participants and wished everyone an inspiring and productive conference, emphasising the opportunities for networking and growing partnerships.
The first panel hosted seven presentations and a roundtable discussion on national (Italy, Germany, Sweden and Canada), supranational (EU) and international approaches (Codex) against food fraud. While competent authorities now can leverage a range of tools and support – see, e.g., the establishment of the National Reference Centre in Germany – additional opportunities arise from digitalisation and artificial intelligence (AI), albeit their full potential will only be accessible with commensurate funding. E-commerce offers numerous possibilities to source counterfeit food or food ingredients that can be used for adulteration (e. g., tailor-made sugar syrups to dilute honey), and its control ranks among the biggest challenges. Additionally, official food control in many European states often operate at different levels (communal, regional, national) and across various sectors (customs, law enforcements, courts) along the agri-food chain, leading to substantial coordination efforts among all units involved. With fraudsters frequently finding new ways of adulterating food, the official control also faces ever new challenges. The common goal of consumer protection is therefore to stay ahead of the situation in order to prevent fraud in the first instance. In conclusion, all speakers unanimously supported the notion of supra- and international collaboration as given by Federal Minister Rainer.
The second panel focused on new challenges and particularly how climate change, geopolitics, economics and tariffs as well as import restrictions might influence the food fraud trends of the future. The panel placed a specific emphasis on involving the onsite participants in interactive discussion: Following two spotlight lectures introducing the topics in general, the participants split up into working groups in order to identify potential new drivers of food fraud. Given the limited time available, the two working group chairs, Selvarani Elahi (Food Authenticity Network, UK) and Claudia Coral (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), focused the discussion on factors carrying a high likelihood and resulting in high impact. The participants elaborated a wide array of potential drivers rooted in diverse social, political, economic, and environmental contexts, demonstrating that the fight against food fraud is by no means an easy feat. Rather, it is a multi-faceted and complex phenomenon that cannot easily be reduced to a few central apparent factors – in particular not within 90 minutes of discussion. Undoubtedly, climate change will lead to an adaptation of agricultural cultivation and shifts in agricultural areas. Geopolitical dynamics, in particular armed conflicts, are expected to cause disruptions of supply chains and increase price volatility for key commodities as well as the likelihood of stolen agricultural products from occupied territories. Finally, higher tariffs and import restrictions might lead to circumventing strategies such as (trans-)shipping via third countries or the use of cheaper, lower-quality substitutes to offset increased costs and maintain or even increase profit margins.
The complex nature of food fraud also presents a challenge for the development of prevention tools and early warning systems, some of which were presented in the third panel. The four presentations focused on a comparison of various national models, including those from Germany (ISAR), Belgium (Belgian Early Warning System Project) and Austria (FraudStat) as well as approaches at the European level (TraceMap, FFRAUD-ER and the European Food Fraud Community of Practice). All of the presented approaches demonstrated the requirement for substantial time and effort for developing such tools, in order to get ahead of the situation by means of data analysis or enable quick backtracing of supply chains. However, prevention tools often have to rely on data (e. g., foreign trade statistics) that by virtue of their nature only become available with a delay of several weeks. Many participants expressed their hope that the AI might present ways to eventually close these gaps.
The fourth and last panel was dedicated to the possibilities of AI, digitalisation, databases and data-management. While one presentation demonstrated approaches and implementation of knowledge management in public administration, a second presentation provided a glimpse of the potential of AI in combination with crowd science can achieve: Using a database fed with images of banana trees by participants worldwide, a deep-learning model could be trained to predict the country of origin of bananas with decent accuracy. Another presentation highlighted that the fate of the European Wine DataBank, which is currently in the process of decentralisation, remains unclear for the time being. This particular example emphasises that data sovereignty and the accompanying (un-)willingness to share data presents a substantial challenge for any institution tasked with the development and maintenance of reference databases. Many participants of the following roundtable discussion concluded that three challenges are pivotal: First, databases need generally agreed basics, which, however, cannot be taken for granted at this time (e. g., due to a lack of standardised approaches for collecting samples of reference materials and their metadata, practical definitions, etc.). Second, data access and information sharing substantially depend on the political will and the legal basis, so that data can be exchanged between various levels (regional/federal, national/European). In addition, legal requirements regarding data protection can be a limiting factor. Third, the set-up of databases and integration of AI models require time for development, computing capacity, specialist staff and appropriate budgets. The programming and training of AI models requires additional personal resources in the short run. In the long run, not only the set-up of databases, but also their continuing curation, maintenance and hosting requires the provisioning of adequate funding.
To wrap up the conference, Andrea Pahne from the BMLEH, who had led through the entire event, thanked all participants, speakers and the organising team for their efforts. She reminded all participants that much has already been achieved in the fight against food fraud, including close collaboration between agencies at all levels, standardisation, implementation of early warning systems and an established fruitful European network of collaborations. As food fraud will remain an important topic in the future and fraudsters are likely to find new ways of circumventing food control systems and detection technologies, improved traceability, more digitalisation, enhanced information sharing, the use of AI, expert knowledge and sufficient funding are needed to successfully protect the consumers.
Image credits: © MRI/M. Peiter
