Fake Food: Lets speak about it instead of your diet beliefs

Ritesh Bawri

06 Jan 2025 — 2 min read

Your desire to be vegan, vegetarian, or carnivorous can cause a war. People fight over the choice of olive oil, ghee, or seed oils. We debate the ill effects or not on our cardiovascular system.

But few people discuss fake food.

Food that is masquerading to be olive oil, soy sauce or wasabi, but isn’t.

Last year, one estimate put the size of the fake food industry at $48 billion. I would wager that the size is much larger. I have been involved in this space long enough.

Our first brush came when we looked at ghee as a product category. It was surprising how easy it was to adulterate the ghee with substitute products. Products that cost a fraction of the cost of the actual product.

The manufacturer pocketing the difference.

There are products and product categories that lend themselves to being faked. Oils, sauces, herbs, and spices being one. So Olive Oil, Saffron, Truffle or Reshi mushroom, which are wildly expensive, being substituted with fake versions.

But it is not just exotic products. Your coffee, garam masala or turmeric could also be mixed with all kinds of alternatives.

Make no mistake, fake food can harm you.

Authorities have even legitimized some of these. I have written in the past, for example, about processed cheese or instant coffee not really containing any of the products they claim, cheese or coffee in this case.

So what should you do?

The simplest would be to avoid paying for exotic products with doubtful provenance. The next best would be to find a reliable supplier and be able to tell the real product from the fake one.

There are websites nowadays that give you explicit instructions on detecting product quality. In the long run, I believe that customers will start to care about the source of their products.

Traceability will matter and companies will be compelled to showcase the trail through which their products were sourced. Only those that do will survive.

Till then, we are in the wild west where anything goes, fake food included.

Reach out to me on twitter @rbawri Instagram @riteshbawriofficial and YouTube at www.youtube.com/breatheagain

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