Exclusive: NFCU chief reveals how new powers are transforming fight against food crime

Since then, there have been 38 events where those powers have been utilised, Andrew Quinn, head of the NFCU tells Food Manufacture.

The NFCU boss says the unit is making “some fantastic improvements” against its key strategic objectives - namely, to prevent food from being rendered unsafe or inauthentic, bringing offenders to justice, and strengthening global and domestic capabilities to tackle food crime.

“We’ve proven ourselves to be effective,” he continues, adding that the new powers have been making some bad actors “think twice about acting dishonestly”; helped along by a string of successful criminal justice outcomes through the courts.

“There’s a load of investigations, all at various stages […] we’ve got some that are waiting for Crown Prosecution Service charging decisions; we’ve got others that are still in the evidence gathering phase; we’ve got some that are already in the criminal justice system.

“We also have, at any one time, a whole series of what we call intelligence development cases. So these are where we’ve received a single strand of intelligence. We get teams to start to look at that, look for patterns, look for ways they might incorporate that intelligence to determine whether or not we should be taking on further full criminal investigations.”

The NFCU also utilises the National Intelligence Model, as Quinn explains: “We carry out a food crime threat assessment every four years. We review our intelligence on a yearly basis, looking at control strategy priorities to make sure that we’re staying focused and being intelligence led. And from that control strategy, we devise what we call a four-P plan, looking at pursue, prevent, prepare, protect to ensure that we are mitigating the threats identified as part of that control strategy.”

The Food Standards Agency’s crime division is also doing a lot more within prevention, with more recent recruit - Ben Pye – driving real progression.

Pye joined the team in 2024 as senior prevention and relationship management officer, bringing with him decades of technical experience. Previous roles include product technologist at Booths where he was responsible for the safety, legality and quality of its branded products.

Quinn called out Pye’s work in developing the prevention team, with the department now hosting face-to-face workshops and scenario-based training for the industry.

“That’s important, especially with small and medium sized businesses because they haven’t got the huge resources that the big companies have,” he notes.

The unit has also focused on training its team in official prevention techniques, an internal decision aimed at enhancing its capabilities in helping businesses protect themselves.

While its new powers affords the NFCU more autonomy, it still works very closely with local authorities and the police. It also maintains a strong partnership with Food Standards Scotland to ensure crime is tackled across the UK.

Global collaborations are also in place, including its partnership with Europol and the Global Alliance on Food Crime – the latter of which brings together the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia to combat food crime.

“We share both results of our horizon scanning, looking at food fraud threats, and we share intelligence about specific cases and threats that might involve multiple supply chains,” Quinn explains.

Closer to home, the Unit has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with its Italian counterparts, which sees the two working together to tackle prosecco fraud.

Earlier this year, an estimated £500,000 of counterfeit wine and prosecco was intercepted by the NFCU.

The unit deals in food crime across the entire category portfolio. Most recently, a National Food Crime Unit (NFCU) operation has resulted in one arrest and the interception of over 33 tonnes of frozen food across England, Wales and Scotland. Read more here.