Food safety and animal feed incidents

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) considers food crime as serious fraud and related criminality in food supply chains. This definition also includes activity affecting drink and animal feed.

There are many different types of food crime. This includes:

• theft
• illegal processing
• adulteration
• substitution
• waste diversion
• document fraud
• misrepresentation - ie marketing or labelling a product to wrongly portray its quality, safety, origin or freshness

Reporting food crime

If you are a whistleblower or a member of the public wishing to report a food crime, you can contact the NFCU's Food Crime Confidential hotline is 0800 028 11 80.

Alternatively, you can report a food crime online.

Local authorities are responsible for cases of poor food hygiene where there is no deliberate dishonesty or intention to deceive customers.

If you decide to report food fraud by whistleblowing, public interest disclosure law protects you from unfair treatment from your employer.