According to PwC agribusiness advisory partner, Greg Quinn, worldwide food fraud results in losses of at least $65 billion a year. Luxury food products are regularly counterfeited and incorrectly labelled, and buyers often have no way to trace the origins of what they are purchasing. Food and beverages were among the top commodities targeted in North American cargo theft incidents last year, according to a recent report from BSI Supply Chain Services and Solutions.

The term food miles is used to describe the time and distance that food has travelled from its production until it arrives with the consumer. The phrase originated in 1994 in a piece written by Angela Paxton who examined the damaging effects of long distance food transportation on the environment and state of food. The increasing levels of globalisation at this time, advances in technology and transportation as well as increased trade deals meant that there was now an effective and efficient pathway to distributing food worldwide. Many have argued that the increased distances that food travels from farm to plate will lead to catastrophic effects on the environment with greater journey lengths for planes, boats and vans. Though some point out that the largest release of dangerous emissions actually occurs during the production phase, meaning that it is more environmentally friendly to import lamb to the UK from New Zealand than it is to produce it inside the UK.