Most often, dairy products and sausages are counterfeited in the Novosibirsk region

“Dairy products have been in first place for a long time . This is especially true for products with a high MILK fat content - butter , cheeses , cream, sour cream products. In second place are sausages and MEAT products,” said Alexander Baev.

According to him, counterfeiting of products occurs by mixing in cheaper components. For example, poultry is added to beef sausage to reduce the cost . The same goes for milk.

“Unfortunately, without laboratory tests, it is difficult to detect violations. There are gross violations that the electronic system can detect. For example, a ton of milk comes to the enterprise, and at the output we have a ton of butter. There is an obvious inconsistency here; knowing the proportions, it is impossible to get the same volume of butter from a ton of milk. This is a signal that something is definitely wrong here. But to prove this, we again need to conduct laboratory studies . If we talk about the volume of counterfeit products, we cannot say that they have increased. For milk, they even decreased,” explained Alexander Baev.

“To combat counterfeits, the Mercury and Honest Sign traceability systems have been introduced. A list of regulatory laws came into force, including the ban on the product name of the same name. For example, a cheese product cannot be called cheese. We are increasingly resorting to laboratory research,” added Alexander Baev.

During the period from January 1 to December 25 of this year, the ROSSELKHOZNADZOR Office for the Novosibirsk and Tomsk regions, as part of the execution of the state task, collected 86 samples of milk and dairy products. As a result, 19 samples (22.1%) do not meet the stated requirements for safety and quality indicators, including nine for microbiology and 19 for fat and oil composition, that is, the products are falsified. Thus, out of 86 product samples, 67 samples (77.9%) meet the stated requirements in terms of safety and quality.