This is a story that is hard to believe.
The most popular items on the black market are often yellow or white as thieves target bulk supplies of artisan cheese rather than jewelery shops.
recently, A 63-year-old man was arrested London cheesemonger Neil’s Yard Dairy in England paid $389,000 worth – an estimated £48,000 – of the delicacy for shredding.
However, the October robbery is just a sample of how premium and high-priced cheese is reaching the criminal underworld.
The situation is such that fed up suppliers like the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium are putting microchips in their products.
Andy Quinn of the United Kingdom’s National Food Crime Unit said, “They know that food crimes carry less severe penalties than drug importing.” Told the British Broadcasting CompanyNoting that money-hungry people “can still make the same amount of money.”
While some nefarious thieves will use food to smuggle drugs, others target perishable items like cheese because it is less consequential if they are cut up by law – or perhaps tainted. .
“There is a long-established connection between food and organized crime,” Quinn said.
Even expensive goods face counterfeit competitors, and to buyers the difference is far more subtle than the counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags sold on New York’s Canal Street, The Wall Street Journal reported,
Counterfeiting has become so widespread and tasteless that distributors of the popular Parmigiano Reggiano variety stopped placing food tracking microchips — smaller than a grain of rice, smaller than a grain of rice — on their 90-pound Parmesan wheels more than a year ago. Had started keeping.
Chips have digital authentication.
“We keep fighting in new ways,” Alberto Pecorari, who handles authenticity issues for the Parmesan Consortium, told the Journal.
The World Trade Organization reports that food fraud, which does not involve alcoholic beverages, The industry costs $30 billion to $50 billion annually,
In recent times, cheese has been a large part of illegal profits, according to dairy expert Patrick McGuigan.
As “an energy-intensive business” due to refrigeration And the need to heat milk, coupled with rising fuel costs due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, led to increased cheese prices, McGuigan told the BBC.
Parmesan expert Pecorari said the industry would not succumb to criminal pressure, no matter how sophisticated the methods employed.
“We will not give up,” he declared.
