2023-11-20 13:38:04
Our investigation aims to be as broad as possible. We collect pepper in every place imaginable: small, medium and large stores, import stores, markets, restaurants… Each time, we focus on the black or white pepper but always ground.
In powder form, it is in this form that a spice is most easily cut with cheaper products. Christophe Brusset, former manager in the agri-food industryauthor of the book “You guys are crazy for swallowing that!” tells us regarding these practices which he once witnessed: “In order to reduce costs, we actually end up cutting the peppers, adding either by-products from the pepper plant, or pepper waste, twigs, things that come from the pepper process and we can also buy, what is called spent pepper, which is the residue of pepper extraction.”
Alongside pepper plant waste, there is another category of substances used by fraudsters. They do not come from the plant: sand, starch, olive pomace, papaya seeds or even cereals. These products, once mixed with the pepper berries, go unnoticed, well not always. Can we find this type of adulterated pepper in Belgium? To find out, we entrust our twenty samples au laboratory of the Walloon Agricultural Research Center.
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#peppers #analyzed #ended #Belgian #market