Food fraud is the deliberate and intentional substitution, addition, tampering or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients or food packaging, labelling, product information or false or misleading statements made about a product for economic gain that could impact consumer health. The only types of food fraud that the CanadaGAP program is concerned with are those that impact food safety. Some examples of food fraud where food safety may be impacted include watermelons injected with forchlorfenuron to increase size, carbide used in fresh fruits to ripen them more quickly, oxytocin injected into produce to keep it looking fresh, bleaching mushrooms to improve appearance, replacing an agricultural chemical with a different chemical, dyeing soy beans green and selling them as green beans (i.e., an allergen risk), and harvesting toxic weeds with leafy greens.
