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Whatsapp To the untrained eye these pieces of wagyu beef might look the same but Australia's Blackmore Wagyu Company was forced to withdraw sales in China due to substandard counterfeit products appearing under their name.

Anyone who’s holidayed abroad knows about the profligacy of pirated DVDs and counterfeit handbags, but counterfeit food is now one of the biggest challenges facing Australian primary producers. Cathy Van Extel reports on the growing threat.

Australian food producers and exporters are calling on the federal government to do more to protect the nation’s clean, green image against a rising tide of counterfeiting.

Unscrupulous foreign operators are taking advantage of Australia’s reputation for quality food by counterfeiting labels and packaging to sell their own inferior and potentially unsafe product in international markets.

An increasing number of Australian producers are being targeted by food counterfeiters in Asia and the Middle East, and exporters are bracing for bigger problems in the future.

The first thing you need to think about is that as soon as your product becomes successful over there [China] someone will try to copy it or steal your brand.

‘Counterfeiting is a huge global industry worth an estimated $1.7 trillion dollars,’ says John Houston, CEO of YPB Systems—one of a new breed of companies that's emerging to develop technology to protect food producers from counterfeiters.

‘The standard issue that people are familiar with is going to Asia and buying a fake handbag or fake Polo shirt or something like that, now that problem is exacerbated by food quality and pharmaceutical quality,’ he says.

‘There is an enormous amount of counterfeit or sub-standard food being sold, especially throughout Asia.’

Australia's high food safety standards enable producers to demand a premium price overseas, and the rapidly growing Asian middle class, especially in China, is prepared to pay top dollar for our food and wine.

‘Australian products are highly prized because they come from a country where the provenance of goods is not in question,’ says Houston.

‘What I would say to any Australian food exporter to China is, the first thing you need to think about is that as soon as your product becomes successful over there someone will try to copy it or steal your brand.'

Premium Australian meat is a particular target. Wagyu beef king David Blackmore, whose product is in high demand around the world, fell victim to counterfeiters three years ago.

In 2012 he was contacted by the head chef of a five-star Shanghai hotel who'd previously used Blackmore Wagyu Beef in Dubai and noticed a difference in quality.

Blackmore says the Chinese product was immediately identified as a fake.

‘We actually put a label inside the Cryovac bag and that label has a code in the ink and I immediately identified it wasn’t ours.

‘My son flew straight to China to get it because we were hearing from other chefs the same sort of thing.

‘There was quite a lot of beef going into the five-star hotels in Shanghai and Beijing that wasn’t our beef.’

Related: Separating fake from fine wine

Blackmore Wagyu Beef tracked down the source of the counterfeit beef to a Chinese company that had an office in Sydney. The information was passed on to both Chinese and Australian authorities. No action was taken.

‘From my point of view all of the evidence that was needed was handed on and we did chase up two or three times but there had been no further action taken,’ says Blackmore.

The Blackmore Wagyu Company has now largely pulled out of China, supplying only five trusted five-star hotels in Shanghai.

Blackmore says the need to protect the Australian food brand is a national issue.

‘The main thing that Australia’s got over all other agricultural export countries, maybe except New Zealand, is our clean and green image and the fact that Australian food is safe,’ he says.

‘The Australian image is very, very important and if we lose the fact that our food is safe because it’s been counterfeited, that’s going to really affect Australia’s reputation in the world.

‘It definitely should have been raised amongst the free trade agreement discussions.’

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Whatsapp Counterfeit liquor on display at the Beijing administration for industry and commerce centre for food safety testing in Beijing.

However, another Australian victim of food fraudsters believes there is little government can do to tackle the problem.

Howard Hansen is the managing director of Hansen Orchards, which exports fresh Tasmanian cherries into Asia.

‘Whatever happens after the product leaves the Australian shore, it’s very difficult for the government to have any influence over,’ he says. ‘They can’t stop someone in Hong Kong, China or Vietnam pulling a lid off a South American product and putting a counterfeit Tasmanian lid back on it.’

Hansen Orchards has been contending with food counterfeiting for the past decade, although there has been a big increase in the past few years, particularly in China.

‘Normally the artwork has got something a little bit different and it’s not quite the same, but they do seem to be getting more sophisticated and they are getting closer to copying the original designs,’ says Hansen.

A fortnight ago, Hansen Orchards discovered a problem in Vietnam after a consumer posted a complaint about food poisoning on social media and included a photo of a counterfeit package of Tasmanian cherries.

Howard Hansen was alerted to the case by Austrade after the story was picked up by a newspaper in Vietnam.

‘Austrade has responded on our behalf and pointed out that there is no Australian product in the [Vietnamese] market and hasn’t been since December last year,’ he says.

While Hansen is confident the companies who import his fruit continue to trust the brand, he is worried food counterfeiting could undermine consumer confidence in Australian cherries.

‘Earlier this year, we had a customer in China that picked up our email address off a counterfeit carton and emailed us to say they’d previously bought Tasmanian product and on this occasion they were really, really disappointed and they didn’t taste nice etcetera.

‘But that was a month before we’d even picked a cherry.

‘We know about that one person who was proactive enough to tell us about it but we don’t know whether there were a thousand boxes or 10,000 boxes, or it could’ve been 100,000 boxes.’

It's a problem that is only going to get worse for Australian producers.

John Houston from YPB Systems says it's still early days in the China market, where the sale of Australian produce is in its infancy.

‘It’s probably more of a potential issue than a real current issue.

‘Having said that, a Chinese consumer who reaches for an Australian-made product will start to question, and today they will question if it’s real or not because so many of the other things that are branded are questionable in China,’ he says.

In the past, security for food packaging has revolved around things like holograms, colour shifting ink or elaborate bottle tops.

With an estimated 50,000 hologram manufacturers in China today, producers are now looking to new technologies such as YPB's invisible fluorescent tracer, which can be scanned.

Houston is urging Australian companies to be vigilant in protecting their brand.

‘There is no silver bullet for counterfeiting. It’s really a matter of putting a business process in place with measures that help protect the brand and the consumer,’ he says.

‘There’s very little anti-counterfeit technology being put into many products today but I think we’ll see more of this and brands becoming more proactive.’

audio Food counterfeiters target Australian brands Counterfeiters are targetting premium food brands, posing a major public health risk and a problem for companies trying to safeguard their brand. 7mins 35secs

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