As any wine connoisseur will tell you, unless that wine came from that one, specific region in France, it’s not really Champagne: it’s just sparking wine. 

And that might not really matter to the average consumer, but the companies and regions that make those products care a lot — as does the FDA. When sellers misrepresent the origins of a product, substitute in a cheaper ingredient, or falsely claim that something is “100%” organic when it’s not, they refer to it as Economically Motivated Adulteration, better known as food fraud.

Laura Reiley is a reporter for the Washington Post covering the business of food. She joined Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal to talk about what kind of food fraud is out there and the new methods that food producers and distributors are turning to in order to protect their IP.

Kai Ryssdal: Okay. Talk to me about the forms that this fraud takes, would you?

Laura Reiley: Well, so first of all, it’s big business. So we’re talking $40 billion a year that it costs the food industry. And it is the fancy food categories, as one would expect. So it’s caviar and the fancy cheeses and wine. I mean, everyone’s seen those movies about wine fraud. But it’s also the normal stuff. It’s commodity row crops, conventional masquerading as organic, it’s meat, it’s just regular old grocery store fish. So from a consumer standpoint, especially if you are willing to pay a premium for a food that either is purportedly a higher quality, or that has better animal husbandry, or some kind of, you know, ESG accolades, you kind of want to know you’re getting what you pay for.

Ryssdal: Yes to all of that. But look, if I go to Whole Foods, or Gelson’s, or Dean & DeLuca, although I guess they closed — I don’t even know what their deal is now — but some upscale food store, right? And I pick what looks like, you know, genuine Parmigiano Reggiano, how do I know it’s the genuine article or if I’m being fleeced?

Reiley: Yeah, so in the case of parmesan, that’s a really interesting one. So they just — it seemed a little performative. You know, it was kind of a stunt. They embedded edible microchips in the logo on those 50-pound wheels. I mean, no one’s gonna buy a whole wheel themselves, unless you’re like completely nuts. But if you see the wheel with the logo on the side, somewhere in that logo is an edible microchip which I think it probably is inert. But it’s just another way that these companies are saying to retailers, and to the consumer, we’re putting our money where our mouth is, and we are going to really stave off all of these imposters.

Ryssdal: The company’s obviously doing this for economic self-preservation. What’s the regulatory landscape here?

Reiley: Well, in some ways, this is in anticipation of more traceability that is coming in as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act. So at the end of 2025, a lot of categories of food will have greater reportability requirements. So there’ll be more kind of QR codes on things so that you can track back. There’ll be things that are these little flexible tags on food that you can scan and really track the whole journey of that food from provenance to table essentially in terms of the temperature it was kept at, how long was it in a truck, you know, those kinds of things will be knowable.

Ryssdal: Let’s get away from the high-end stuff and to the more mundane. You mentioned fish a minute ago. There was a line in this piece: seafood may be mislabeled as much as 25 to 70% of the time. That seems a lot.

Reiley: Okay, so you go out longlining or whatever, and you get a lot of bycatch. And you want to use that bycatch. And if it’s a fish that looks adjacent to the fish that you’re catching, you’re just gonna put that in the mix. Sushi I think is notorious for having tiny little cross sections. The average person has no idea what kind of fish is in that roll, right? So, you know, we’re frequently eating things that are not what they are purported to be.

Ryssdal: This actually goes to the safety of the food chain and something like 25% of Americans report being very confident in the safety of the food supply. 25% of Americans being very confident is not a high percentage.

Reiley: Indeed, it is not. Well, some of it is just there isn’t good oversight. You know, we do not have the manpower to do really rigorous inspection of food at ports or in any context really. So some of it is just, we kind of shake our heads and hope that the food is what is purported to be. And a lot of food is, you know, a fillet of fish on a little styrofoam tray. Nothing could be more anonymous than that.

Ryssdal: Consumers will eventually pay the price for these, you know, edible microchips and labels and all the bells and whistles that are going to tell us where our food comes from, right?

Reiley: Of course. It does get passed down but I think it is a peace of mind thing. And certainly the intent is to root out some of the bad actors that are counterfeiting. If you have edible holograms or invisible ink or serial numbers or those kinds of things on your cheese or your wine or honey, it will probably encourage some of the bad behavior to cease.