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United Nations Advocates Tracking Food With Tokenization, Blockchain And AI Databases To Reduce 'Food Fraud'

  • Aug 16, 2025
  • 1 min read

Date: August 16, 2025


As tens of billions of dollars are wasted annually in so-called “food fraud” around the world, industries and global leaders are seeking to implement ways to stifle these exploits and gaps in domestic and foreign food trade. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has proposed the use of tracking food digitally by placing these items on a digital blockchain ledger as tokenized assets, along with things such as DNA barcodes, so companies and governments can monitor in real-time the flow of goods to end this fraud.

In 2021, the FAO published a paper titled “Food Fraud: Intention, Detection and Management.” The report described food fraud as the deliberate mislabeling and marketing of food, such as lying about a product’s contents, point of true origin, or passing off some ingredients as others (i.e. mixing sunflower oil in with olive oil while still calling it 100% virgin olive oil). The UN says:

“Food fraud is commonly described as any suspected intentional action committed when a food business operator intentionally decides to deceive customers about the quality and/or content of the food they are purchasing in order to gain an undue advantage, usually economic, for themselves. While this is a common description, many others also exist. Examples of food frauds include adding sugar to honey, selling regular beef as Wagyu beef, or injecting shrimp with gel to make them look larger and weigh more.”

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