00:01Europe's best food safety experts are joining forces to crack down on fraud.
00:06Euronews is following them in this special series called The Food Detectives.
00:12In this first episode, we're with the team fighting fishy deals in fishing.
00:24Over 3 million tonnes of fish are caught and sold in Europe every year.
00:28And not everything that's traded across the continent is exactly what it claims to be.
00:35In fact, the sector often faces questions over traceability, transparency and fraud,
00:40as Norwegian food detective Truls Backyard Rader explains.
00:46Some of the problems in the supply chains today could be that fish is caught in areas
00:51where you're not allowed to catch them, or you can catch it at a time when it's not allowed.
00:59You could use gear that is illegal to use in certain places,
01:04or you could claim that your fish is sustainably sourced through some kind of certification,
01:08and the fish that you actually are selling does not have the certification.
01:12The diverse nature of the fishing business complicates the picture,
01:19as catches can come from factory ships or tiny boats,
01:22records aren't always digitalised, and even naming conventions vary.
01:27For instance, there are a lot of different types of catching gear that exist.
01:32These do not have standard names across the fisheries,
01:35so they might be reported as completely different things by similar fishermen doing similar jobs.
01:41So, food detectives Truls Backyard Rader and Karolina Grun are working on a solution
01:51to make fishing fraud much more difficult.
01:54Karolina oversees quality management at this Danish-owned fish processing plant
01:58in Koschelin in northern Poland.
02:01She says the fraud usually occurs before the pallets of frozen fish reach their factory.
02:08We are receiving the fish, the whole fish, so we can see the species.
02:13We are sure what fish it is.
02:16We can distinguish it, but we cannot confirm only at the look at it where it's coming from
02:25and with which catching gear it was caught or in which period.
02:32So, when we receive the goods to our factory,
02:35not all of the information is available in the documents.
02:38Truls and Karolina are now working together to fill in those gaps in their knowledge along the supply chain.
02:47I think the main problem with the information is that if it exists, it's hard to get at.
02:52So, it's kind of, it is a bit of detective work for each unit that we need to study.
02:59Their ultimate goal is to develop a digital tamper-proof format for a new kind of product passport
03:04that follows the fish from the sea to the supermarket.
03:09We are trying to make a link between all of these different ideas and labels
03:14so that you can follow a single pallet all the way through the supply chain.
03:19The more we increase the traceability and transparency in the supply chain, the harder it is to cheat.
03:26Just one example of how tricky traceability can be is here in the filleting operation.
03:31In this processing hole, we are trimming the fish.
03:36We are cutting it to the specification, as with the customer.
03:41The challenge we have here is that the specifications are very narrow,
03:48giving us various parameters that we need to keep.
03:52And for that, we have to mix different lots together, different batches of product.
03:57Right now, with no digital product passport in place, keeping track of which fish went into which product is extremely time consuming.
04:07Our team in the logistics is spending hours on making sure we have the right data in the right place in our system.
04:16The food detective's aim is to make such lengthy tasks a thing of the past, and help consumers sail a safe passage through an ocean of information.
04:26The hope is that the work we are doing will become an industry-wide standard, where all the actors in all the various supply chains in the fisheries industry are able to collect and share information in a standard way,
04:40so that when you see the fish on your plate, you know exactly what it is.
04:44And it has been caught sustainably.
04:47Well, that's all for this episode.
04:50Next time, in the food detectives, we're in Germany and France, with a team tracking fraudulent chicken and beef.
04:56See you then.
04:57See you then.
04:58See you then.
