Food fraud costs the UK economy an estimated £2bn a year. Until recently, prosecuting the businesses behind it was notoriously difficult. This has just changed and most food businesses haven’t caught up.
Three recent legislative reforms have converged over the past 12 months and together they make corporate prosecutions for food fraud easier: a new corporate failure to prevent fraud offence; an expanded senior manager attribution regime; and enhanced investigative powers for the National Food Crime Unit (NFCU).
The result is a significantly increased prosecution risk for food businesses that fail to act.
What is food fraud?
Food fraud involves deception for economic gain, typically by adulteration, substitution or mislabelling of food products. Common examples include misleading durability or country of origin information, or the substitution of cheaper ingredients – mixing real honey with alternative sugars, for instance. Carried out dishonestly, with intent to gain or cause loss to another, it can constitute food fraud.
Since September 2025, the new failure to prevent fraud offence under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) has applied to large UK companies. Organisations are criminally liable and exposed to an unlimited fine if an associated person commits fraud intending to benefit the company – subject to a defence of reasonable fraud prevention procedures being in place.
This offence avoids the historic difficulties in prosecuting corporate fraud posed by the identification doctrine, which confined corporate criminal attribution to the ‘directing mind and will’ of a company. Food fraud is clearly within scope of the new offence.
ECCTA also introduced a new senior manager-based statutory route to corporate criminal liability for various economic crimes, which was subsequently expanded to all offences on 29 June 2026 by section 250 of the Crime and Policing Act 2026.
This marks a significant expansion from the old identification doctrine. The actions of senior managers, acting within the actual or apparent scope of their authority, are now directly attributable to the company – including for offences like fraud. Unlike the failure to prevent fraud offence, this route offers corporates no reasonable procedures defence and prosecutors don’t need to prove the company was the intended beneficiary.
Non-financial offences committed by senior managers, such as obstruction or the falsification of documents, can now be attributed to a company too – a further increase in criminal exposure in the context of any food fraud investigation.
The NFCU, set up after the 2013 horsemeat scandal, was handed enhanced investigatory powers in May 2025: applying for and executing search warrants, seizing and retaining evidence, and conducting post-arrest suspect interviews (it still relies on the police for the arrest itself). The new powers follow the collapse of its high-profile Russell Hume investigation, which cost the taxpayer £2m.
These powers have already been deployed 13 times across four operations. The NFCU’s June annual update signals more of the same, with increased targets for deterrent action and a stated aim to “fully utilise our new investigatory powers” in pursuit of “successful criminal prosecutions.”
The practical effect: food fraud is now more likely to be detected, evidenced and charged than at any point in the NFCU’s history.
Implications for food businesses
Food businesses need to review their compliance policies against the failure to prevent fraud guidance issued by the Home Office and make sure that robust procedures are actually in place – not just on paper.
Existing regulatory compliance procedures are not enough on their own, they were built for different risks. The starting point is a dynamic, documented and regularly reviewed fraud risk assessment, feeding into a fraud prevention plan and associated risk-based prevention procedures. The NFCU’s online food fraud resilience assessment tool provides a useful benchmark for that process.
Taken together, these three reforms have lowered the evidential bar for corporate accountability in food fraud cases. The businesses still relying on yesterday’s compliance framework are the ones carrying tomorrow’s risk.
Richard Reichman is a specialist food safety lawyer at BCL Solicitors
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