Opinion: Fraser Edwards, co-founder and CEO, CHEQD
There is something that cannot be sweetened with honey, especially when facing discomfort, as there is a place in brutal integrity: 96% of honey imported in the UK are fake! Tests found that 24 of the 25 bottles were suspicious or did not meet regulatory standards.
Self Sovereign ID (SSI) can fix this.
Both the UK Food Standards Agency and the European Commission are urging reforms to address this concern by creating a robust traceability database within their supply chain networks to ensure consumer transparency and trust. However, data is not an issue. The problem is that people are tampering with it.
This is not the first time it has been revealed that this is not the first product. Honey’s Authenticity Network emphasizes that in 2020, a third of all honey products are fake.
What is EMA and how does it affect honey?
Economically motivated poor quality (EMA) involves intentionally replacing valuable ingredients in inexpensive products such as sweeteners and low-quality oils. This practice leads to severe economic and health complications, and in some cases, illness, due to toxic additives from alternative products.
Adultery often involves creating ultra-diluted blends with minimal nutritional value, which counterfeiters call… honey.
The con man dilutes the product with high fructose corn syrup or increases the thickness with starch or gelatin. These adulterers closely mimic the chemical profile of honey, making them extremely difficult to detect in traditional tests such as isotopic ratio mass spectrometry. Fake honey lacks essential enzymes that give real honey flavor and nutrients. Worse, honey properties vary based on honey source, harvest season, geography, and more.
Some companies further obfuscate the process by excluding the content of pollen, a key identifier of honey’s geographical origin, before exporting to intermediate countries such as Vietnam or India. Once this is done, the product is brought to supermarket shelves and is given false certifications to direct higher prices. This tactic takes advantage of the fact that many regulators do not have a way to verify all shipments.
The hidden costs of food fraud
The supply chain is extremely fractured as it passes six to eight key points of the supply chain before it arrives on the UK shelf. Current practices make it extremely difficult to verify reliability. Coupled with inefficient paper-based bureaucracy, which makes it difficult to track obscure attempts of origin in the Middle Countries, it is not possible to reliably determine the true scope of food fraud.
One Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimate suggests that at least 1% of the global food industry is affected by up to $40 billion a year, and could be even higher.
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Not only does fraudulent practice hurt consumers, it destroys beekeepers’ livelihoods, floods the market, and destroys the profitability of legitimate traders. Turkish beekeeper Ziya Sahin explained his complaints about food fraud regulations.
“Our beekeepers are mad. They ask why we’re not doing anything to stop it. But we don’t have the authority to inspect,” he said. “I’m not even allowed to ask street sellers if their honey is real.”
There is a growing appetite for more reliable testing and more stringent execution, but the solution is lagging behind. What is the latest EU attempt to fix this? The digital product passport is designed to track honey’s origins and composition, but has already been criticized for being ineffective and easy to operate, leaving the door open as fraud continues.
EU Passport is an ineffective solution
The European Union’s Digital Product Passport aims to address this by increasing supply chain traceability and transparency. By 2030, all EU products require a digital product passport with detailed information about the product’s lifecycle, origin and environmental impact.
This idea sounds promising, but it is not recognised to the extent that fraudsters can build certificates and obscure their origins by handing over the middle country with staff who turn blind.
Trust is at the heart of this issue. Despite history showing that these rules are bent, we rely on the government to implement the laws and regulations. Technology, on the other hand, is an agnostic and doesn’t care about money or incentives.
This is a fundamental flaw in the EU approach. This is a system built on the surveillance of humans who are vulnerable to corruption, where these supply chains are already known.
Product Self-Severin Identity (SSI)
While many people already recognize the tri-lema of scalability, Trust Triangle is an important concept in SSI that defines how trust is established between publishers, holders and validation factors. All products make fraud much more difficult as they must be backed up with verifiable credentials from trustworthy sources to prove it is real.
Issuers such as manufacturers and certification bodies create and sign verifiable credentials that certify the reliability of the product. The owner, typically the product owner, will store and present these credentials as needed. Verifiers such as retailers, customs officials, consumers and other validators can verify the validity of their credentials without relying on central authorities.
Verifiable credentials are protected by encryption. When someone tries to sell a fake product, a missing or invalid credential will quickly reveal the scam.
Government reforms must expand beyond current regulatory oversight and examine the approach outlined in Trust Trirema to protect the supply chain from widespread adultery and fraud.
SSI provides the underlying infrastructure needed to ensure that product identities across multiple bodies, standards and regions. By enabling tampering and end-to-end traceability of all products, whether it’s a honey jar or a designer handbag, SSI ensures that the data is correct for sufficient valtters to tackle fraud and obfuscation attempts.
SSI also enhances consumers to enable independent verification of products without relying on third-party databases. Buyers can scan products to further reduce the risk of false information even if they reach the shelf, and authenticate their origins and history directly through encryption certifications confirmed by the validator. This also helps reduce corruption and inefficiency. This is a slow process as many checks are made on paper and can be easily changed.
As honey scam methods continue to expand, these products will harm consumers and local businesses. Therefore, the steps taken to tackle these methods must also be expanded. The EU’s digital product passport aims to improve traceability. But unfortunately, they are not as sophisticated as a con man. Implementing SSI is the necessary step to effectively address the scope that scammers take to ensure they arrive on the shelves.
Opinion: Fraser Edwards, co-founder and CEO, CHEQD.
This article is for general informational purposes and is not intended to be considered legal or investment advice, and should not be done. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or express Cointregraph’s views and opinions.
