Product quality and the ways to control and improve it are among the most widely discussed problems in any field of business. If quality checks are not performed properly, it may have serious consequences for the level of customer satisfaction with any kind of product. As is demonstrated in the work by Changizi, Farahmand, Soltani, Asareh, and Ghiasvand (2013), quality-related mistakes turn out to be extremely costly in the food industry. Their research attracts more attention to the problem of the identity of imported alimentary products.
The article under discussion is devoted to the method of DNA barcoding in fish species identification and its ability to shed light on the situation with product identity in Iran. In their work, Changizi et al. (2013) highlight that falsification is especially common in the fishing industry since many products are sold “in frozen or fillet forms”, which makes it harder for average consumers to recognize the causes of food fraud (p. 784). Within the frame of the study, the researchers picked up about three thousand kilograms of processed fish products sold at three store chains in Tehran and conducted a series of identity tests with the help of DNA barcoding.
As is clear from the results, four out of five types of fish products included in the sample were labeled correctly. Speaking about the fifth product, the fillet of Spanish mackerel, the correct scientific name of the fish was substituted by a different name to increase its price. The results indicate that the motivations of some food producers can still be reduced to economic benefits, but further development of DNA-based methods of food fraud detection positively impacts the situation in the market.
References
Changizi, R., Farahmand, H., Soltani, M., Asareh, R., & Ghiasvand, Z. (2013). Species identification reveals mislabeling of important fish products in Iran by DNA barcoding. Iranian Journal of Fisheries Sciences, 12(4), 783-791.