Frauds in organic foods: An update on strategies of detection, challenges and management

Food fraud poses a significant challenge within the global food supply chain, with apprehensions regarding aspects such as food safety, authenticity, and efficiency. Currently, food fraud prevention is emerging as a unique food research area due to the unpredictability and potential economic gain to fraudsters. However, food fraud incidence/ events are increasing. Due to globalization of production and distribution, modern food fraud events could be massive in scale as they have both regional and global impact. 

In this minireview, we have described the basic organic food landscape, concept of food fraud, and its types. Emphasis has been given to the various validated methods of identification of food frauds and techniques employed for their detection. Methods such as spectroscopy, chromatography, and DNA -/chemometric -based techniques. Further, the application potential of recently developed AI-based techniques is also briefly discussed. In a separate section, food fraud issues related to herbs and spices have been dealt with a focus on various sensitive detection methods based on DNA technology and illustrated with a subset of specific spices and organic Honey.