How are frauds uncovered in black pepper trading?

Black pepper is among the most widespread spices in the world, which attracts great attention even from various fraudsters. Pepper is traded by weight, which allows dishonest people to influence the weight of pepper in packaging in various ways.

Adding husks and other “ impurities ” to Package

The weight is influenced, for example, by adding black pepper husks to whole grains or other “ingredients” that have no place in the content. However, these fraudulent practices, which often also occur with pepper commonly offered in domestic supermarkets, can be detected thanks to the developed method.

Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark focused their research on the possibilities of detecting similar unfair practices in the trade of vanilla and black pepper. “We have developed a method that allows us to determine whether black pepper is pure or contains added bulk materials such as husks, papaya seeds, and other waste,” explains scientist Amelie Sina Wilde.

How quality control will be conducted in the future is a question

The method relies on spectrometry technology combined with chemothermal methods. Based on a collected sample, scientists can precisely define the content of an entire large export bag and thus determine the quality and purity of the given shipment. Quality control can therefore be performed quickly and efficiently.

This is university research that will still take some time to find its way into practice. However, the discovered method gives consumers hope that one day such tools will be used, allowing them to be certain that they are buying truly only quality pepper and nothing else in it.

Here at .pepper..field we achieve absolute quality and purity through several controls, from manual selection directly in Cambodia to food-grade laser technology, which finally scans Package for us so that it will never happen that you find anything else in Package with Kampot pepper. :-)