Opinion of: Fraser Edwards, Co-founder and CEO, Cheqd
Brutal honesty has its place, especially when it is confronted with discomfort, so here is one that cannot be sweet with honey: 96% of honey imported into the United Kingdom is false! Tests revealed that 24 of the 25 pots were suspect or did not meet regulatory standards.
Self-identity (SSI) can solve this problem.
The British Food Standards Agency and the European Commission urge the reform to respond to this concern by creating a robust traceability database in the supply chain networks to ensure the transparency and consumer confidence. However, data is not the problem. The problem is that people falsify.
This is not the first time that the products have been inauthentic, with the Honey Authenticity Network stressing that a third of all honey products were false in 2020, a fraudulent industry amounting to 3.4 billion euros ($ 3.65 million) of counterfeit goods entering the EU in 2023, as reported by the European Commission.
What is EMA, and how does it affect honey?
Falsification of economic motivation (EMA) implies intentionally substituting precious ingredients for cheaper products such as sweeteners or low quality oil. This practice leads to economic and serious health complications – and, in some cases, the disease – due to the toxic additives of substitution products.
Adulteration often involves the creation of an ultra-diluted mixture containing a minimum nutritional value, and counterfeiters call it … Honey.
The fraudsters dilute the product with corn syrup with high fructose or increase thickness with starch or gelatin. These members closely imitate the chemical profile of honey, which makes detection with traditional tests extremely difficult such as mass spectrometry of the isotopic ratio. False honey does not have the essential enzymes that give real honey its flavor and nutrients. To worsen things, Honey’s characteristics vary depending on the sources of nectar, the harvesting season, geography and more.
Some companies filter the content of pollen, a key identifier of the geographic origin of honey, before exporting it to intermediate countries like Vietnam or India to further obscure the process. Once this is done, the products are brought to the shelves of supermarkets and labeled with false certifications to order higher prices. This tactic uses the fact that many regulatory organizations cannot afford to check each shipment.
The hidden cost of food fraud
The supply chain is deeply fractured, because a jar of honey spends six to eight key points from the supply chain before its arrival on the shelves in the United Kingdom. Current practices make the verification of authenticity extremely difficult. Coupled with the ineffective paper bureaucracy which makes it difficult to follow up on attempts to obscure origin in intermediate countries, we cannot reliably determine the real extent of food fraud.
An estimate of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggests that at least 1% of the global food industry, potentially up to 40 billion dollars per year, is assigned – and it could be even higher.
Recent: WIs the hat a decentralized identity in the blockchain?
Fraudulent practices do not only harm consumers – they destroy the means of subsistence of beekeepers, flooding the market and destroying the profitability of legitimate traders. Ziya Sahin, a Turkish beekeeper, explained the frustration of food fraud regulations:
“Our beekeepers are angry and they ask why we don’t do something to stop it. But we don’t have the power to inspect,” he said. “I am not even allowed to ask street sellers if their honey is real.”
Although there is a growing appetite for more reliable tests and a stricter application, the solutions are lagging behind. EU’s last attempt to solve this problem? The passports of digital products are designed to follow the origins and composition of Honey, but they are already criticized as ineffective and easy to handle, finally leaving the door open to fraud to continue.
EU passports are an ineffective solution
The passport of digital products from the European Union aims to tackle this by improving traceability and transparency in its supply chains. By 2030, all EU goods must have a digital product passport containing detailed information on the product life cycle, origins and environmental effects.
Although the idea seems promising, it does not recognize to what extent fraudsters can forge certificates and obscure origins by passing products by intermediate countries alongside those who turn their eyes.
At the heart of this question is confidence. Despite the story showing that these rules can and will be folded, we are counting on governments to implement laws and regulations. Technology, on the other hand, is agnostic and does not care about money or incentives.
This is the fundamental defect in the EU approach – a system built on human surveillance vulnerable to corruption for which these supply chains are already known.
Auto-sovereign identity (SSI) for products
Many people are already aware of the trilemma scalability, but the triangle of trust is a key concept of SSI which defines how confidence is established between issuers, holders and verifiers. This makes fraud much more difficult because each product must be supported by a verifiable diploma of a source of confidence to prove that it is real.
Emitters, such as manufacturers or certification organizations, create and sign verifiable identification information that testifies to the authenticity of a product. The holder, generally the owner of the product, stores and presents this identification information if necessary. Verifiers – such as retailers, customs managers or consumers – can verify the validity of identification information without relying on a central authority.
The verifiable identification information is protected by cryptography. If someone is trying to sell false products, their missing or non -valid identification titles immediately reveal fraud.
Government reforms must extend beyond the current regulatory surveillance and explore the approach described in the trilemma of the trust to protect the supply chains of falsification and generalized fraud.
SSI provides the underlying infrastructure necessary to reliably monitor the identity of products on several bodies, standards and regions. By allowing traceability from end to end in each product – whether it is a jar of honey or a designer handbag – SSI guarantees that sufficient validators confirm that the data is correct to fight against fraud and attempts to obscure.
SSI also allows consumers to independently check the products without counting on third -party databases. Buyers can scan the product to authenticate its origin and history directly via cryptographic certifications confirmed by validators to further reduce the risk of disinformation even if it reaches the shelves. This would also help reduce corruption and ineffectiveness, as many checks are made on paper, which can be easily modified and is a slow process.
While honey fraud methods continue to develop, consumers of these products for consumers and local businesses. The measures taken to fight against these methods must therefore also expand. EU digital products passports aim to improve traceability; But unfortunately, they are not sophistication of fraudsters. The implementation of SSI is a necessary step to effectively approach the measure that fraudsters take to ensure that their product arrives on the shelves.
Opinion of: Fraser Edwards, co-founder and CEO, cheqd.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and must not be considered as legal or investment advice. The points of view, the thoughts and opinions expressed here are the only of the author and do not reflect or do not necessarily represent the opinions and opinions of Cointellegraph.
