Can we trust our store cupboard spices?
Spices, along with herbs and blended products like seasonings, have long been an attractive target for fraudsters. By Nick Hughes.
When young children across the United States started testing positive for lead poisoning in 2023, health officials immediately set to work identifying the source of the problem. The culprit turned out to be a range of cinnamon apples sauce pouches, designed to be a convenient meal for toddlers, in which the cinnamon powder had been contaminated with lead.
The supplier of the product was based in Ecuador and had sourced the raw cinnamon sticks from halfway across the world in Sri Lanka before processing them and selling them to retailers across the United States.
The supplier had failed to ever test its product for heavy metals, according to a Food and Drug Administration document seen and reported by CBS News. Yet such contamination – whether deliberate or unintentional (it has yet to be confirmed whether the lead was added to the cinnamon deliberately in the US case) – is an ever-present danger where spices are concerned.
Spices, along with herbs and blended products like seasonings, have long been an attractive target for fraudsters. They are invariably high value commodities that are traded globally and often pass through multiple pairs of hands before ending up on retail shelves. Crops frequently undergo further processing into a product far removed in appearance from that which is harvested by the farmer, presenting a perfect opportunity to disguise their real nature within culinary ingredients or processed foods.
Some of the most common types of fraud involve swapping a low value ingredient for the higher value commodity – blending olive or myrtle leaf with oregano, for example, or bulking out paprika with white pepper.
Health risk
Although not all adulteration presents a food safety risk there are many examples of where fraud involving spices and herbs can pose a serious danger to public health. Illegal and potentially carcinogenic colouring agents, such as the Sudan group of dyes, are sometimes added to spices like paprika and turmeric to give them a more vibrant appearance; an alert issued in January this year through the EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) with a risk rating of ‘serious’ warned of the presence of the unauthorised colorant methyl yellow in turmeric powder from India.
Another notable risk is where a spice or herb has been contaminated or adulterated with an undeclared allergen. In September 2024, the pizza chain Domino's issued an urgent recall of two mustard-based dips which had been found to contain traces of peanuts causing allergic reactions among some customers. Many other companies were also impacted. The contamination is thought to have occurred at source where peanuts were being grown as break crops alongside mustard in order to improve the health of the soil (legumes are increasingly employed in regenerative farming approaches due to their ability to fix nitrogen in the soil).
“Some of it is due to bad agriculture and/or bad manufacturing practices. The second big issue will be fraud. And the third will be a general lack of understanding about where the crop is being grown and the risk associated with practices such as co-cropping or break cropping.”
— Chris Elliot, Institute for Global Food Security
Professor Chris Elliott, a global authority on food fraud and founder of the Institute for Global Food Security (IGFS) at Queen’s University Belfast, says contamination with allergens – accidental or otherwise – is a particular risk factor for herbs and spices.
“Some of it is due to bad agriculture and/or bad manufacturing practices. The second big issue will be fraud. And the third will be a general lack of understanding about where the crop is being grown and the risk associated with practices such as co-cropping or break cropping,” he says.
A growing risk involves contamination of crops with naturally occurring toxins. Two recent RASSF alerts, both rated serious, warned of the presence of pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) in dried oregano from Turkey and in marjoram from Egypt.
Professor Elliott explains that scientists are finding ever more cases of PAs and their chemical ‘cousins’, tropane alkaloids, in a multitude of products. This is partly due to a drive among farmers to reduce the use of herbicides and pesticides, whose application kills off the toxins, but is also due to a warming climate which means toxin-producing plants are slowly moving northwards where farmers don’t recognise the dangers they pose to health.
Targeted testing
The main defence against contaminants ending up in consumer products is testing for pathogens and authenticity. This is often targeted based on intelligence gathering and other forms of horizon scanning, albeit authorities periodically carry out random sampling exercises to check for risk.
One such exercise took place between 2019 and 2021 when the European Commission carried out the first coordinated control plan on the authenticity of herbs and spices across the bloc.
Nearly 10,000 analyses were carried out on 1,885 samples, using a range of state-of-the-art analytical techniques to assess the authenticity of six different herbs and spices. The percentage of samples which were deemed at risk of adulteration were 17% for pepper, 14% for cumin, 11% for curcuma (turmeric), 11% for saffron and 6% for paprika/chilli. Oregano was identified as the most vulnerable with 48% of samples at risk of contamination, mostly with olive leaves.
On pathogens specifically, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland in collaboration with the Environmental Health Service and the Official Food Microbiology Laboratory Group of the Health Service Executive, last carried out a national survey to investigate the microbiological safety of dried herbs and spices back in 2017. In total, 855 samples were collected by environmental health officers.
Samples were tested for Listeria (L. monocytogenes and Listeria species), Salmonella, presumptive Bacillus cereus, Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC); Escherichia coli and Enterobacteriaceae. The results found that, whilst the majority of dried herbs and spices were microbiologically safe, pathogens including Salmonella and presumptive Bacillus cereus were detected at unsatisfactory or borderline levels in a small percentage.
Business responsibility
With regulators under pressure to make finite financial and human resources stretch as far as possible, much of the responsibility for ensuring the safety and authenticity of herbs and spices falls on businesses themselves.
Back in 2015, the UK Food Standards Agency along with the Food and Drink Federation and Seasoning and Spice Association (SSA) was alerted to a serious risk coming out of Canada and the United States after batches of ground cumin and paprika tested positive for undeclared peanut protein. The level of contamination suggested the products had most likely been adulterated with cheaper materials for financial gain.
As a result, representatives from the two trade bodies, along with the British Retail Consortium, developed bespoke industry guidance for culinary dried herbs and spices, including blends, with the aim of protecting the integrity of supply chains. The guidance includes a decision tree featuring key questions such as – ‘Do you know what you are buying? Are you buying from an approved/certificated supplier? Is the price reflective of the material being purchased?’ – to help buyers mitigate against the risk of adulteration and substitution.
Fast-forward ten years and food retailers will often have contractual agreements in place with suppliers that require them to carry out authenticity testing of their ingredients and the largest supermarkets typically have their own routine monitoring programmes.
Once you step outside of mainstream supply chains ... the risk of adulteration and contamination increases significantly due to a general lack of oversight and control.
— Chris Elliot, Institute for Global Food Security
Professor Elliott believes mainstream retailers in the UK and Ireland have a clear understanding of the risk associated with herbs and spices. “They also tend to buy from people who do their own processing,” he explains. Once you step outside of mainstream supply chains, however, he suggests the risk of adulteration and contamination increases significantly due to a general lack of oversight and control.
This theory was borne out by an investigation by BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme at the start of 2024. Reporters tested herbs and spices from supermarkets and local stores using a portable hand held device developed by Bia Analytical, a spin-off company from the IGFS, which combines state-of-the-art miniaturised hardware, cloud based computing and artificial intelligence (AI)-based modelling to tell the user in real time whether a food product has been adulterated.
Of the 61 herbs and spices tested, 20 were sent for further analysis of which seven were verified as inauthentic. Three were bought online from Amazon, one from a national health food chain and the others from local corner shops. None of the herbs and spices were purchased from major supermarkets.
Simplified supply
While proactive testing of herbs and spices provides an opportunity to uncover fraudulent practices before consumers are placed in harm’s way, some within the spice trade are looking to simplify supply chains in a way that reduces the opportunity for adulteration.
Jawahir Al-Mauly established Ujamaa Spice Co. in 2022 to give some sense of agency back to spice farmers on her home island of Zanzibar and pay them a fair price for their produce. Ujamaa buys spices direct from the farmers, imports them via an air freight company owned by Al-Mauly’s cousin, and processes them, before selling direct to UK customers. Farmers receive around three times more for their crop than what they are paid by local middlemen.
"During the conventional journey from farmer to consumer you don’t know how many hands that spice has gone through and what has happened to it on that journey. You just don’t have that information. You’re buying it and trusting that what’s given to you is what it says it is. ... I know exactly which farm the spice has come from, who the farmer is and the harvest date.”
— Jawahir Al-Mauly, Ujamaa Spice Co.
Al-Mauly explains how as part of her commitment to ethical business she was motivated to create a simpler, more transparent supply chain for spices. “During the conventional journey from farmer to consumer you don’t know how many hands that spice has gone through and what has happened to it on that journey. You just don’t have that information. You’re buying it and trusting that what’s given to you is what it says it is.”
Al-Mauly and her team are in the process of building a website app that will allow Ujamaa customers to scan a QR code and then track the exact journey of the spice from the farm level. “I know exactly which farm the spice has come from, who the farmer is and the harvest date,” she notes.
Such is the capital invested in mainstream supply chains that scaling these kind of innovative alternatives will take time and no little effort. Regulators, businesses and even consumers will need to remain vigilant to the risk that their favourite store cupboard herbs and spices are not always as they appear.
Nick Hughes is a freelance writer and editor specialising in food and environmental affairs. He contributes articles to specialist publications including The Grocer and Footprint and is the author of numerous reports and whitepapers on food-related issues. Nick has previously worked in advisory and policy roles for the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
