Food Fraud: Focus on Juices

Atlante’s Food Fraud Observatory focuses on the risks associated with products and categories. The goal? To raise awareness and help businesses operate with greater responsibility.

Fruit juices are drinks obtained by pressing or directly extracting juice from fresh fruit and at an appropriate stage of ripeness, through different transformation processes. Traditional industrial processing processes involve heat treatments such as sterilization and pasteurization, which allow for greater shelf life over time, as the product is microbiologically stable. In recent years, especially for fresh-cut (minimally processed) and ready-to-eat products, the use of high-pressure technology (High Pressure Processing) has become increasingly common, subjecting packaged foods to hydrostatic pressures thousands of times higher than atmospheric pressure (up to 6,000 bar). The high-pressure values inactivate the microorganisms present, thus treating the products microbiologically, but preserving their chemical-physical and organoleptic characteristics.

Evolution

Fruit juices can be sold as is, i.e. only fruit with no other ingredients added, or concentrates, with or without pulp, and often have vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fibre and protein added, to ensure consumers have an important and balanced nutritional source. Consumer attention, and therefore the processing industry, has turned to the non-concentrate juice (NFC) sector and smoothies with fruit and vegetable blends, without added sugars but with the addition of functional ingredients. All these factors, as the landscape of the fruit juice industry changes, make ensuring product authenticity an ongoing challenge for consumers and legislators.

Definitions

There are several types of fruit juice on the market, generally identifiable by the processing method used to bring the product from the field to the shelf and the specific regulations in force in the country where it is sold. Fruit juice is marketed either as juice, as purée, or as concentrate (juice or puree from which water has been extracted). Eliminating water from the product greatly reduces storage space requirements and considerably lowers transportation costs. The product from concentrate is stored at very low temperatures or in aseptic drums and transported in large quantities from the production area to the processing areas, where it is reconstituted by the rehydration process with water. The juice is then pasteurized, packaged and sold as “100% fruit juice from concentrate” or “100% fruit juice prepared from concentrated fruit juice”. Juices are identified based on the transformation process they undergo, which also characterizes their shelf life.

European Directive

According to the Codex Alimentarius standard (see below), the physical, chemical, organoleptic and nutritional characteristics of the fruit from which the juice comes should be maintained, while the EU Directive limits this aspect to colour, flavour and taste. This is somewhat closer to industrial reality, since a juice cannot have the same physical, chemical and nutritional characteristics as a fruit. A juice is liquid and a fruit is partially solid and contains more fiber. Furthermore, the chemical structure cannot be the same, since the use of authorized enzymatic treatments changes the chemical composition and some substances are eliminated with the solid parts of the fruit during the extraction process.

Industrial practices

For the European Union, a Code of Industrial Practice has been developed by the European Juice Association (AIJN), which is regularly updated. This document provides analytical reference data for specific fruit types and provides comments for appropriate interpretation. Some of the guide values indicated are mandatory, such as the minimum value of soluble solids (°Brix), the maximum limits of heavy metals and the parameters that identify the deterioration process. The analytical parameters used instead for the evaluation of the authenticity of the product are generally indicative. Case-by-case interpretation is always necessary, supported by expert reading of the analytical data.

Codex Alimentarius

The Codex Alimentarius provides the following definition of fruit juice: “Fruit juice is the unfermented, but fermentable, liquid obtained from the edible part of healthy, adequately ripe and fresh fruit, or fruit maintained in good condition by suitable means, including post-harvest surface treatments applied in accordance with the applicable dispositions of the Codex Alimentarius Commission. […] The juice is prepared using appropriate processes that maintain the essential physical, chemical, organoleptic and nutritional characteristics of the fruit juices from which it comes…”. The European Union, with the “Fruit Juice Directive” of 2001/112/EC provides a slightly different definition from that of Co dex, namely “Juice is the fermentable, but unfermented, product obtained from the edible part of healthy and but still fruit, fresh or preserved by cooling or freezing one or more types mixed together, having the colour, the characteristic flavour and taste of the fruit juice from which they come…”.

Most cases of fruit juice fraud have no real impact on food safety. However, any food fraud poses a potential health risk to consumers, due to the use of ingredients not declared on the label, which could therefore cause problems related to the possible presence of allergens or substances considered allergizing to some individuals or due to contamination by pesticides or other contaminants not declared for incorrect origins, or by any other ingredients/raw materials added fraudulently and not declared on the label.

Fraud

As with many categories in the food sector, several potential frauds have also been identified in the juice and nectar sectors. Below are some of the most well-known issues related to authenticity:

• Adding water
• Use of non-organic raw material, in products labelled as such
• Addition of ingredients not permitted by Regulation
• Adding sugar
• Total or partial replacement of juice not from concentrate, with juices from concentrate
• Addition of products from cheaper fruits, not declared on the label
• Addition of ascorbic acid/undeclared vitamin C
• Addition of undeclared organic acids (e.g. citric acid, malic acid)
• Addition of aromatic compounds (natural or synthetic)
• Use of dyes (e.g. anthocyanin, carmine, beetroot extracts)
• Addition or overuse of fruit extracts produced with unauthorized technologies (water-extractable solids)
• Agents that influence consistency (e.g. pectins)
• Incorrect declaration of origin
• Incorrect fruit variety declaration.

Verifications

Some of the possible analyses to be carried out to verify the authenticity of a product:

1. Check the Brix value and the Brix/acidity ratio.
2. Checking the sugar profile.
3. Verification of the sugar-free extract and its relationship to the total amount of sugar.
4. Test to explain sugar-free extract, with available data.
5. Verification of the ratio of compounds within the sugar-free extract.

Complexity

Due to the complexity of authenticity checking in fruit juices, analytical product authenticity checking is characterized by being a more or less ad hoc combination of different methods. This leads to the need to carry out a large number of analyses of individual parameters, which is necessary to define a significant overall profile, which requires prolonged timeframes and high costs. There will remain a need to confirm analytical observations by targeted methods. Isotopic techniques are likely to meet a significant part of this need. Internal reference methods will play an important role in this regard. Due to the increasing number of production regions for semi-finished products, agricultural development, and climate change, interpreting analytical results will become increasingly difficult, and specific reference databases will be needed in the future.