Police crack down on food safety violations
Shanghai police said on Tuesday they have solved over 150 food safety crimes this year and caught over 360 suspects.
In one case, eight people were caught by police in Baoshan District earlier this year and are now facing charges.
Police said they started their investigation in November last year after receiving a report from a resident that there was a strong smell of alcohol from a house and it seemed that someone was illegally producing baijiu — a strong Chinese liquor — inside.
Police said the house was rented by a man surnamed Hong with his relatives, and found empty bottles and packaging materials of four famous baijiu brands — Moutai, Wuliangye, Jiannanchun and the Yanghe Blue Classic series.
The suspects bought buckets of unbranded baijiu to fill the bottles at night.
The fake baijiu of famous brands was transported to a wine wholesaler based in Songjiang District who then sold it to his outlets and other retailers, police said.
The price of the fake baijiu the wholesaler purchased from the suspects was only 30 to 50 percent of the market price. In January, police raided the suspects in four locations in Shanghai and also in Zhejiang where the packaging materials of the fake baijiu came from.
During the raid, police discovered about 1,000 bottles of the fake baijiu, 3,000 empty bottles and 3,000 labels.
The empty bottles to be used to produce the fake baijiu discovered by the police during their raid of the suspects
Some fake Moutai baijiu produced by the suspects
He Junyi, head of the food, drug and environment safety crime squad of Baoshan District police, said consumers can use apps of baijiu brands such as Moutai and Wuliangye to check the authenticity of the alcohol.
“The apps enables NFC detection of the chips embedded in the bottle caps, and if the chips are fake, the apps will remind the consumers that they’re not authorized,” he said. "The apps will also show the past NFC request records."
He reminded that some fake baijiu manufacturers now use recycled chips for bottle caps, and consumers should be aware that an authentic chip of an authentic bottle of baijiu usually doesn’t have previous NFC request records.
In another case, police of Yangpu District caught four suspects who allegedly produced and sold a “diet coffee” with sibutramine, a substance used in prescription medicines for treating obesity and banned in China to be used in food products.
Police started their investigation in January after receiving a report that someone was selling the coffee on the Internet in the name of a famous local company producing biological products.
The coffee was found to be produced in Shangqiu city in Henan Province by a man surnamed Han and his wife and sold to a man surnamed Mao in Shanghai who was running an Internet shop.
The suspects were raided in Shanghai and Henan in March with 120,000 packs of the coffee, 165 kilograms of sibutramine powder and 9 tons of coffee powder seized together with the production machines.
The place in Shangqiu city, Henan Province, where the "diet coffee" was produced
Collaboration for efficiency
Yang Haiqing, head of the food safety crime squad of Shanghai police, said the number of food safety crime cases in Shanghai keeps dropping year by year.
“At the same time our crime combating results are getting better because we aim to trace the problematic products back to their manufacturers in every case,” he said.
To more efficiently crack down on such crimes, police have been working closely with the administrative bodies overseeing food and drug safety issues. In all cases since 2018, 30 percent were investigated based on initial clues shared by the market inspectors and others, and 90 percent of the cases were solved under concerted effort.
Chen Yan, vice head of the food safety coordination department of Shanghai Market Inspection Administration Bureau, said they cooperate with the police throughout a crime case.
“We share clues and also resources for investigation such as lab identification of the problematic products,” she said. “We also make sure that those products are properly destroyed or recycled after the case is closed.”
The police said they have also signed cooperation agreements and memorandums with several Internet businesses incorporating online shopping including Alibaba, Tencent and Pinduoduo to combat such crimes.
Under the cooperation, the businesses inform the police of crime clues and enable the police access to its transaction data during the investigation, according to the police.
