What this paper covers
Premium food is a near-perfect target for fraud: buyers pay a large premium for an attribute — origin, grade, method, purity — that they cannot verify by looking at the jar. The counterfeit food economy exploits exactly that gap, and it does so at industrial scale. In several categories, far more product is sold under a protected name than the origin region could physically produce in a year.
This paper uses Mānuka honey as its worked example because the gap is unusually well documented, then generalises the pattern to olive oil, saffron, aged vinegars, caviar, and premium dairy. The common failure is structural rather than lazy: certification programs verify a producer, a batch, or a test result, and that verification stops at the point where product is repacked, blended, or relabelled downstream.
The second half sets out what has to change. Certification has to travel with the individual unit, the packaging has to reveal whether it has been opened, and the verification has to be something a shopper can perform in the aisle in a couple of seconds. That is what a tamper-evident provenance seal delivers: source-to-shelf evidence rather than a claim on a label.