Food Defence and Fraudulent Activities in Food Transport: Insights from More than Sixty Transport Hygiene Risk Analyses, 2024–2025
Vladimir Surčinski* and Hans-Dieter Philipowski
ABSTRACT
Background: Food transport is a distributed process with uneven control maturity across routes, assets, and operators. In addition to unintentional contamination hazards, transport networks are exposed to intentional interference (food defence) and economically motivated deception (fraudulent activities). Despite this, transport hygiene risk analyses are still most often discussed through a hygiene lens, with limited synthesis that explicitly combines defence and fraud perspectives.
Methods: We performed a retrospective review of anonymised outputs from more than sixty transport hygiene risk analyses conducted between 2024 and 2025 in bulk food logistics. Each assessment examined cleaning verification and validation evidence, loading and unloading controls, documentation integrity (including cleaning certificates), post-cleaning security, and chain-of-custody governance. Risks were mapped to operational control points (cleaning, sealing, loading, transport, unloading) and screened against credible threat scenarios using Motivation–Opportunity–Capability–Consequence scoring.
Results: The same control gaps repeatedly supported both defence and fraud scenarios. The most frequent weaknesses were: (i) reliance on paper statements and visual checks as release criteria; (ii) limited evidence that cleaning achieves allergen and residue control under operating conditions; (iii) inconsistent competence coverage for seal checks, anomaly reporting, and hold decisions; and (iv) weak control of custody breaks such as overnight stops, public parking, and uncontrolled waiting zones. Digital sealing and digital seal plans were observed in a minority of cases; when combined with geofencing and a defined incident response protocol, they improved detection of
unauthorised opening events.
Conclusion: Transport hygiene risk analysis is strengthened when defence and fraud scenarios are built into risk ranking, control design, monitoring, and incident response, rather than treated as parallel topics. Practical recommendations are provided for sealing plans, digital seal governance, cleaning certificate integrity, secure holding zones, and competence-based escalation rules.
