The Food Detectives: Beating fraud from the farm to the butcher
Europe's top food safety experts are joining forces to crack down on fraud. Euronews is following them in this special series called The Food Detectives. In Episode 2, meet the team beating fraud from the farm to the butcher.
In partnership with the European Union & the Watson Project
READ MORE : http://www.euronews.com/2025/09/22/the-food-detectives-beating-fraud-from-the-farm-to-the-butcher
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00:00Europe's best food safety experts are joining forces to crack down on fraud.
00:07Euronews is following them in this special series called The Food Detectives.
00:11In this episode, we're tracking meat from the farm to the butcher.
00:25We begin in central France, where food detective Donato Andoeser wants to detect cases of fraud in which lower-priced beef is sold as prime meat.
00:35Latrice has maybe tried to pass animals to feed in a system of production, for example, based on corn and corn,
00:45to pass animals to feed in idyllic conditions.
00:53Pinpointing whether there's any fraud involves costly and time-consuming farm inspections.
01:01But now, at the Inray French Agricultural Research Centre, Donato and his team have developed a portable device that uses infrared light to quickly check if beef was grass-fed or not.
01:13So, for this meat, what's the conclusion?
01:28From the fields of France to the picturesque German region of Bavaria, where food detective Andreas Romp is researching fraud in chicken meat.
01:44The liquid injected into the chicken imitates the meat, but these food detectives have worked out how to find it.
02:06With such precision, it's possible to spot where the liquid is in the chicken, but the food detectives have to be fast to catch the fraudsters.
02:34Food fraud is most often motivated by money.
02:46Unscrupulous suppliers want to sell a lower-quality product for a higher price.
02:51Such cases can end up in a criminal court.
02:54So courts have to be certain when fraud has been committed.
02:58And that's when they need the experts at Germany's Max Rubner Institute.
03:02Dagmar Brueggemann leads the team developing ultra-precise techniques to analyse meat.
03:08Good morning.
03:10In the process of the Watson project, we specialized on hamburger burgers.
03:16We can test if we can find a certain mix of organ and organ meat.
03:24And what concentration we can find.
03:28Their goal is to develop a super sensitive testing system that can be used in legal cases.
03:34And that means scrutinizing samples at a molecular level to be much more accurate than rapid tests that can even lead to false accusations of fraud.
03:43If a method is not exactly right and has a mistake of 25% of a mistake, it means that you don't recognize false tests, but that there may be a bigger problem that a unrighteous test is being false.
04:02That's why the accuracy is so important.
04:06Back in France, and Donato Andoesa now plans to test his device to detect grass-fed beef on cattle from Germany and Spain.
04:17So, does he think it's possible to eliminate fraud in his sector?
04:21Transparency total, I don't know, because we don't abord all the aspects of food and the conditions of production.
04:34But at least it will improve the transparency.
04:39That's all for this episode.
04:41The Food Detectives Series is part of the EU's Watson project funded by the Horizon Europe Programme.
04:47Next time, we're in Finland with the experts making farm products you can trust.
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