11 Of The Most Faked Foods In The World | Big Business | Insider Business

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Published 2023-09-03
Hate to break it to you, but your truffle oil wasn't made from truffles. Your vanilla extract? Well, that's probably just a lab-made derivative of crude oil. And your shaker of Parmesan cheese? It probably has wood pulp inside.

You might feel the companies behind these food products are using deceptive packaging — but it's legal. However, there's a whole other level of trickery that's completely illegal: food fraud. That's when criminals bottle up corn syrup and call it 100% honey, or when they pass off cheap mozzarella as pure Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Globally, the fraudulent food industry could be worth $40 billion. It hurts legitimate producers, funds criminal activities, and can even harm consumers. We head around the world to uncover how producers get away with food deception and how we can spot the real stuff.

0:00 Intro
1:08 Truffles
3:44 Maple Syrup
5:19 Wasabi
7:42 Parmesan Cheese
11:15 Vanilla
12:58 Caviar
14:40 Honey
17:30 Olive Oil
20:04 Wagyu Beef
22:20 Coffee
24:05 Saffron
25:58 How criminals get away with selling fakes

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11 Of The Most Faked Foods In The World | Big Business | Insider Business

All Comments (21)
  • @Arqan93
    My Grandfather is a hobbyist beekeeper. He generally has around 18 to 20 active beehives and specializes in raspberry honey, as there are large raspberry fields nearby. The honey his bees produce is unlike any other I have ever tried. It's almost as if you took the smell of a blooming raspberry garden and closed it in a jar. His bees produce around 300-350kg of that honey every year and it goes for around ~20$/kg, so it's really quite expensive. But it sells out so quickly, people make reservations 2 years in advance. It's completely worth it though - the taste is amazing and it will never spoil unless you contaminate the jar. Every summer I spend a weekend or two helping him maintain the apiary and it's such a relaxing experience. Over the last 10 years I got stung maybe a dozen times and I don't even bother with protective clothing. Bees really are precious critters and need to be protected.
  • @tinybullfrog1955
    As a person with severe allergies, the fact that the label can lie is probably the scariest part of this for me.
  • @mathiasm8489
    Biggest problem is that misleading labels are legal.
  • @offlineable
    I honestly don't mind imitation products as long as they taste good and won't hurt me, but I DO mind is being lied to and potentially poisoned by greedy companies.
  • @alg003
    Love that companies can just get away with literally false advertising and illegal practices with 0 consequences because of money
  • @Livlifetaistdeth
    Anyone buying a Parmigiano shaker thinking it's real Parmigiano cheese has much bigger problems than believing their cheese is really authentic Parmigiano cheese.
  • the point about people not buying cheap crap would help, the problem with this is so many people have to buy cheap just to survive, they can't afford to choose.
  • Yes blame the consumer, it's all their fault, because they buy the stuff that's allowed to be sold to them. Let's not talk about the "alleged" corruption that allows the fake and poisoned food to be on store shelfs.
  • @Self_Evident
    A core problem is allowing terms such as "artificial flavor" and "natural flavor" as "ingredients" (and all their variations). A flavor, whether artificial or real, is NOT an ingredient - it is a property of an ingredient. Edit: I originally used the terms "artificial flavoring" and "natural flavoring", but a couple of comments pointed out that "flavoring" is not "flavor". So, I changed "flavoring" to "flavor" to be more grammatically consistent with the rest of the comment. However, "flavoring" is also used in ingredients lists, and is just as wrong.
  • @tuluva1
    My professor quoted a line from Nepal, it says if you have no food on your table you have one problem but if you have food on the table you have thousands. This thing really hit me hard.
  • @MeganKugs
    I absolutely adored the woman talking about honey, what a little sweetheart! Great information and sense of humor. 💜
  • @kedeeky
    I swear everything has just become so exhausting. No matter how known the deception is, we’re still left to foot the bill. The way that costs have gone up, this is an even more painful truth.
  • @MrYfrank14
    I remember years ago I started only buying peanut butter that contained peanuts. Family laughed at me. I didn't think expecting my peanut butter to be made from peanuts was unreasonable.
  • @aditya_baser
    Thank you for making this video. Very informative. I had no idea about most of them.
  • @seamstressajm
    I started making my own chocolate fudge sauce because all the store brands are now using high fructose corn syrup. The Aldi brand was the last one to cave. When I started buying it a few years ago, it listed just sugar, but now it has HFCS in the ingredients. I look at all labels now to avoid that ingredient in my diet. I think it’s one of major causes of the mass obesity in our country.
  • @manuelsanchez064
    My mom was received a rare gift of authentic extra concentrated Dominican vanilla. It had no fillers and processed and produced in a way that it's natural sugars prevented it from going bad if fridged, the thing was so highly concentrated if you pour more than one or two drops into the milkshake blender it was too much flavor! I grew up with it, It lasted 10 years in my fridge, I'll probably never actually taste real vanilla ever again.
  • @marryc9394
    The worst part isn’t even the fact that it is literally fraud, but that committing the fraud hurts the industries that actually makes the real stuff, thus stunting their potential growth and the global supply of the authentic products. :/
  • @chronesrt2925
    Sounds to me like the biggest issue with 100% of all our imported products is the shipping and security. We just learned here in canada our ports have 5 people checking 550k containers a day so theres no way to be sure, not even checking labels. Noone can trust Anyone or anything nowadays.
  • @kurtmagnus5243
    As a beekeeper I understand what they’re talking about when they say you have to have patience. I don’t really get much honey but when I do, it’s wonderful when I sell it to my customers and they tell me that it is the best honey that they’ve ever tasted. I didn’t even know that China was the largest producer of Honey in the world