
Inside the World of Large-Scale Food Heists - tim_sw
http://www.eater.com/2016/6/22/11994836/food-theft
======
paulcole
Not a food heist, but a funny food story nonetheless, as I heard it from my
uncle an FDA inspector.

A US company got ahold of a load of tuna and wanted to sell it for people.
Unfortunately, it didn't make the grade, so it was canned and labeled as
catfood.

Then they found out that Canada had looser standards when it came to tuna, so
the cans were sold and shipped up there.

Unfortunately the company who bought it got lazy and slapped the tuna fish
label over the catfood label. Somehow some cans were sold to a US retailer and
the FDA started to get calls from people who got a big surprise when they were
peeling the labels off their cans of tuna and found a catfood label beneath
it!

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anotherarray
As a software engineer, I started a food marketplace startup in Brazil
([http://liderfood.com.br/en](http://liderfood.com.br/en)) and the black
market was much larger than we could ever imagine.

It's not just stolen food. There are entire industries for:

1) Acquiring and "reprocessing" expired food.

2) Smuggled food from overseas. Mainly for avoiding taxes.

3) Buying uncertified or unregulated goods (e.g. directly from farmers or
uncertified factory)

It ends up being a painstaking process to make sure all our partners comply
with regulations and quality standards.

~~~
jswny
Your first point intrigues me. Could you possibly elaborate on how the
"reprocessing" of food works and what that process entails?

~~~
overcast
I imagine it's similar to any other processed food. Take initial food, change
it into another form, most likely not even related.

~~~
VLM
Dry pasta is eternal as long as its kept dry, but can't be legally sold that
way. Ditto plain white rice. Non white rice goes rancid in a couple months.

Aged "many years" cheese is normal (for some hard cheeses), but its only
allowed to age a couple months in a fridge.

Potato chips if sealed from air won't go rancid.

Chocolate is eternal unless contaminated and even if its bloomed it can be
remelted and re-tempered.

Honey is also eternal. Ditto syrups. And yes its illegal to sell food without
an expiration date so even honey has an expiration date laughably.
Crystallized honey can be fixed by 20 minutes of heating.

Salt has an expiration date. No kidding. For that pink Himalayan salt (or more
likely fake made with food coloring) its 15 or 20 years I don't remember
which.

~~~
cleaver
I had to look it up... Himalayan salt is a Cambrian era deposit. 20 years
seems a little short.

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pyre
An "economic act of terrorism?" I guess he feels that since people aren't
taking it seriously enough, he needs to throw around the "t-word" these days
to get people to pay attention?

~~~
hyperbovine
Exactly. Theft sucks and thieves should be punished, but give me a fucking
break:

terrorism |ˈterəˌrizəm| (n) the use of violence and intimidation in the
pursuit of political aims.

------
samatman
Clicked for the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist. Was not disappointed.

[http://modernfarmer.com/2014/01/illustrated-account-great-
ma...](http://modernfarmer.com/2014/01/illustrated-account-great-maple-syrup-
heist/)

~~~
nervoustwit
Funny? It was an act of terrorism.

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wtbob
See, this is why I just don't get drug prohibition. Why aren't we rededicating
the resources we throw away on prohibition to preventing & investigating
things like this? why is $100,000 worth of marijuana a greater threat to the
Republic than $100,000 worth of stolen cheese?

~~~
robalfonso
Thats a Gouda idea!

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nimos
Funnily enough people actually smuggle cheese as well.

[http://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/2015/09/18/niagara-cop-
foun...](http://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/2015/09/18/niagara-cop-found-guilty-
of-cheese-smuggling)

------
adanto6840
Seems like something you could put a stop to very quickly with the use of some
tracking technology & a medium-sized budget. I've got to guess that the actual
impact to the industry and, more importantly, to the industry's insurance
companies is just not large enough to warrant such an effort/cost.

I mean we're talking about physical goods here, in relatively large
quantities, that are moving about at relatively slow speeds -- seemingly
within very trackable regions. I understand "going after the big boss" \--
but, at some point, it seems like stopping the issue "on the ground" may be
the better & more effective way to curtail the issue.

It really just sounds like the free market (read: the producers, transporters,
and [mostly] the insurers) don't deem the issue worthy of the expense to
curtail it.

~~~
logicallee
>Seems like something you could put a stop to very quickly with the use of
some tracking technology & a medium-sized budget.

yes, it's true, any office with a handful of experienced engineers should be
able to put together a GPS food tracker using a budget of only $100,000 and in
just six months... in 1997.

Today, any hobbyist can assemble one for $100 in marked-up hobbyist parts and
in an afternoon, or, if that's too much work, buy one for $30 that works out
of the box.

~~~
bluesign
Or put one cheap android phone, and track

~~~
pavel_lishin
And a sim card. And a power supply. And remember to keep topping up that sim
card.

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pseingatl
In Iraq there was a theft of 10,000 tons of chicken. Who do you think bought
the stolen birds?

See, [https://www.amazon.com/Law-Rockets-American-Lawyer-
Iraq/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Law-Rockets-American-Lawyer-
Iraq/dp/0991047699/)

------
bertil
This sounds like a good reason to implement traceability of products — in
addition to quality and hygiene control.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I guess you could do it by adding non-toxic trace elements; you could run your
chicken salad through a mass spectrometer, and count the proportion of the
trace elements.

"Aha, according to the ratios of Chromium(II), Chromium(III) and the isotopes
of Iron, this was packaged at the Chickenorium factory in Chicago during the
first week of December 2016!"

------
neil_s
Is anyone on HN familiar with this industry? Are there any reasons that simple
GPS tracking of the goods wouldn't work? Or is it simply not as big of an
issue as this article is making it out to be?

~~~
VLM
I worked in the retail food industry as a starving student and one of the few
nice things about megacorporate control of the food supply is corporate had an
excellent idea of how many boxes of granola they shipped us vs how many we
sold and questions would be raised if the sales figures didn't at least
vaguely match the single source shipping figures.

Some independent ethnic market, or a restaurant, well, all bets are off, but
they're a very small part of a very huge industry.

Most of the anecdotes are variations on very old insurance ripoff schemes
which is why they're getting caught. The concept of ripping off an insurance
company is not new nor specific to food and they're pretty good at figuring it
out.

The guy who sold $32K of stolen shrimp gets to do that once in his entire
life... meanwhile the regular seafood guy who was selling legal shrimp is
pissed off and motivated to rat out the thief, so the problem is kinda self
correcting. Remember that the average small business restaurant goes out of
business in three years or less unlike the supply companies who have been
around forever. The restaurant has no loyalty to the supplier, but the
supplier has no loyalty to the restaurant.

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deegles
I read a sci-fi book where people lived in colonies around the solar system,
and one of the most valuable and smuggled commodities was cheese (since milk
was only produced on earth).

