VICTORIA MARTINEZ
Senior News Editor

Food adulteration may not be a buzzword, but it has a huge impact on businesses worldwide.

Adulteration, or counterfeiting, is the food equivalent of picking up a faux Louis Vuitton handbag from a street vendor in Paris: it looks perfect, it costs a fraction of the real thing and its cachet is still high to an untrained eye. However, it might fall apart, its warranty is nonexistent and the right person will know it’s a fake.

In foods, adulteration means what you see on the label is not what you’re getting in the bottle — and there’s no way of knowing where the switch came in.

“The barcode holds a tremendous amount of information,” said Nicholas Low, a University of Saskatchewan researcher working on ways to prevent counterfeiting from happening.

Beyond price, a barcode relates where, when and by who the product was packaged, along with shipping information and a wealth of other data. However, the barcode only accurately tells the story of the packaging.

“It doesn’t tell you anything about where what’s inside has been,” Low explained.

The economic fallout of counterfeiting can be huge. Low cited the example of Proctor and Gamble in the 1990s. The foods giant once served up orange juice in its line of products, purchased from another company, diluted, repackaged and presented as part of the Proctor and Gamble line. But the orange juice turned out to be not quite as advertised and the fallout was huge.

Rather than allow the orange juice fiasco to sully their reputation, the company discontinued orange juices.

Low’s team is working on a solution for Louis Vuitton bags and orange juice alike: Biotagging. Like a barcode, biotags provide a lot of information about a project. But unlike barcodes, the tags are inserted in the product itself.

The U of S researcher’s goal is to produce tags that are soluble in any sort of material, from leather to liquid to metal. Right now, he has 10 tag “numbers” that can be strung together to create an individual packet of information.

There are also two varieties of tags his team has created. Consumers seem keener on the carbohydrate option for foods, while a DNA-based tagging system could see applications in plastics and metals.

The importance for consumers is huge, said Low. Natural health products, for example, are often mislabeled. Biotags would help verify that a bottle of ginseng actually held the herb, not a fake.

There are drawbacks, however. The tags are currently inserted during the processing of a product. For some materials, processing can include extreme temperatures and pressure that can damage a tag. One solution is to create protective capsules for the tags, which in turn could reduce the damage to a product when one tries to test for tags, by allowing them to be easily separated.

At approximately three cents to tag a $3 item, tagging is still relatively expensive — especially for day-to-day products.

“We’ve developed the tags. Now we’re trying to do an abundance at low cost.”

Low envisions a future where the tags could be sprayed on plants like pesticides.

“Ultimately, I want this to work not only for processed foods but also raw.”

Another goal: getting the tags inside living things, like salmon, so consumers could verify their wild Atlantic salmon is exactly that, not farmed pacific salmon or something entirely else.

The applications are endless: Swiss army knives with the brand in the plastic. Free-range livestock tagged in its lifetime. Orange juice that’s just that.

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image: Pete Yee