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Food Crime Strategic Assessment 2024

The UK Food Crime Strategic Assessment (FCSA) is a joint assessment produced by the Food Standards Agency’s National Food Crime Unit (NFCU) and Food Standards Scotland’s Scottish Food Crime and Incidents Unit (SFCIU). This 2024 report refreshes the last FCSA, which was published in autumn 2020.

Last updated: 12 September 2024
See all updates
Last updated: 12 September 2024
See all updates

Food crime is defined as serious fraud and related criminality within food supply chains. This includes drink and animal feed.

The purpose of this document is to highlight food crime trends and to review how our understanding of known food crime threats have changed. The FCSA enables the prioritisation of our response to the most harmful food crime issues, and the generation of strategic recommendations and priorities, see our Control Strategy. It also helps us to identify the most significant gaps in our understanding of food crime.

Summary

The document explores overarching factors which influence the threat landscape, before outlining threats in more detail within each of the seven types of activity observed within the food crime intelligence picture. The report concludes with a forward look considering the new and existing issues that might have an impact on the future threat landscape over the coming period. We set high level recommendations for how the NFCU and our colleagues in Scotland will look to take forward the findings of the report.

England, Northern Ireland and Wales

Feedback

We welcome views on this report and invite submissions of feedback via the online form which can be found here: Food Crime Strategic Assessment 2024 - Feedback Survey.