Patty Lovera, the assistant director of the food-safety advocacy organization Food and Water Watch, said as that food-supply chains have grown increasingly complex, they’ve created more opportunities for food fraud to occur. Getting a food product onto grocery-store shelves now involves more middlemen across a higher number of countries. At the same time, the shape of supply chains has also changed through consolidation, with more power concentrated at the beginning.

“There are so many chances for something to go wrong, whether it’s an innocent mistake or someone chooses to be fraudulent,” Lovera said. “At the end of the line, the customer might not get what they paid for. There is not enough accuracy testing going on, and people have a right to know that the food labels they look at are accurate.” Inaccuracies can be dangerous to people with allergies, and devastating to someone with ethical and religious concerns (someone who refrains from eating pork, for example, has a right to expect that their pork-free products live up to the claim; same with vegetarians and meat-free items).

According to Martin Wiedmann, a professor of food safety at Cornell University, the FDA primarily focuses its efforts on keeping food uncontaminated, rather than the accuracy of labeling.

“The FDA does not have unlimited resources, but to be honest, I’d rather the FDA do more work on food safety than making sure that red snapper doesn’t happen to be tilapia,” he said. “I think private industry will play a very, very important role in this issue.”

So does Clear Labs. The company was founded in 2013 by Sasan Amini and Ghorashi in 2013, both of whom left their jobs at genomics companies to apply DNA-testing technologies to the food industry. The process is similar to the genomic analysis used in clinical trials to personalize cancer treatments—when a hot-dog package proclaims the contents to be “all beef,” Clear Labs’ analysis can compare the molecular makeup of that hot dog against the molecular signature of beef, stored in the database, to see if it’s true. The company says it can also determine whether the label’s nutritional claims are valid.

“Once we started to test the U.S. food supply in a rigorous fashion, we started to see a 10-15 percent discrepancy rate between product claims and actual molecular content of the food,” Ghorashi said.

In the Clear Foods initiative’s report on hot dogs and sausages, the company analyzed 345 samples across 75 brands and 10 retailers, and found that 14.4 percent of the products tested were “problematic in some way.”

Around 3 percent of the samples found pork where it shouldn’t have been, most often in meats labeled as chicken or turkey, and around 10 percent of the vegetarian products contained meat. Vegetarian products seemed to have the most problems across the board: Four of the 21 vegetarian samples had hygienic issues (accounting for two-thirds of the hygienic issues found in the report), and many vegetarian labels exaggerated the protein content by up to 2.5 times the actual amount.