More than half of the canned saury might have been produced from cheaper species of fish, or its amount might have been insufficient, says the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance (Rosselkhoznadzor.) The agency checked e-documents on the production of canned saury and reported about “a very large percentage of adulteration” in it.
“A total of 3,500 tonnes of canned fish were made from 1,900 tonnes of raw saury. This is impossible without adulteration. Saury was not used as a raw material at all in 878 tonnes of canned fish,” Rosselkhoznadzor said. Earlier, counterfeit canned fish was reported by the Dobroflot company.
Experts checked about 900 items where saury is listed as a raw material or “derivative product.” As a result, a large percentage of falsification was revealed. Recently 858 e-documents on the production of 6,000 tonnes of saury have been issued in the Mercury system alone. They say that about 7,300 tonnes of canned fish have been produced from this amount, while the technologies allow producing about 5,000 tonnes from fresh fish or from 4,200 to 4,600 tonnes of canned fish from frozen raw materials.
The inspection revealed that such producers as Logistics Company-A, Zhemchuzhina, Ryazhskaya Fish Processing Company, Galle, Russian Fish World, and Trading Network-Commandor were likely to have knowingly produced entire batches of outright fakes, where saury had been massively replaced with other raw materials. A total of 59.6% of falsifying documents were detected in Logistic Company-A. In Fortuna Crimea, there were 78.4% of forged documents, and 85.7% were found in the Mercury H company. Fish Island became “the leader” with a record-breaking 86.3%.
A total of 26 fish-processing companies from 16 Russian regions were selected for the check. Sampling was completely random. That is, the probability of getting into it was the higher, the more batches of canned fish the company produces per unit time. It was the signs of mass counterfeiting of saury that made Rosselkhoznadzor start laboratory inspections of canned saury.
As for the activities of the Dobroflot group of companies, based in the Maritime Territory, its manager Alexander Efremov explained a little earlier that they fished in the Far East and were considered the largest coastal fish cannery in Russia by volume of production.
“No one but Dobroflot fishes saury and supplies it to Russia,” Efremov told RBC. “There simply cannot be that much raw material, and yet, all the shelves in stores are literally full of saury. We make tests and see that it is counterfeit.”
This confirms the opinion of many experts that producers often use cheap herring instead of more expensive saury when making canned products.