S21 - Session O4 - Going bananas: From risky businesses to latest authentication technologies

Authors: Saskia van Ruth *, Zhijun Wang, Sara Erasmus

Corporate and supply chain integrity are important official corporate values of most actors in food supply chains. Breaches of integrity lead to significant monetary losses (25-36 billion euro globally per year) and sometimes to tragic incidents. Food fraud also erodes consumer confidence and negatively impacts the growth of particular production systems that may be more susceptible to this kind of crime than others. Food integrity incidents around the world have further increased the need to strengthen companies' ability to combat fraud within their own organizations and across their supply chains. In many supply chains, but especially those with growing demands, such as the organic sector, fraudulent practices surface either out of perceived pressure or greed. In these incidents, it is not a contaminant or a microbe at the core of the problem, but a human adversary is, which is pivotal to consider. This presentation delivers a novel approach to address this issue by: (a) identification of the most food fraud vulnerable nodes of organic banana supply chains using criminology-based assessments and (b) examination of a wide variety of novel authentication methods to mitigate the risks. We have identified key food fraud risk factors based on the principles of the criminological routine activities theory which takes into account a suitable target (opportunities), a motivated offender (motivations) and (lack of) guardianship (controls). The technological mitigation measures are based on intrinsic product features that are carried along the supply chain and which can be used to identify production and geographical origin of the bananas.