Chinese state media announced results of last year's crackdown on fraudulent meat and vegetable oil conducted by China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR). The news issued during the "two session" political meetings in Beijing is surely meant to reassure citizens outraged by rampant reports of premium cooking oil and lamb barbecue diluted with cheap substitutes. A deeper dive reveals that it's impractical to completely eliminate food fraud.
According to reports in State media, market regulators held a campaign in 2025 to address public concerns about adulteration, counterfeiting and false labeling of meat products and vegetable oils. During the campaign regulators reportedly inspected 4.55 million meat and cooking oil products across the country, found 461,200 problems, closed 4,297 illegal online stores and accounts, and ordered platforms to delete over 11,000 pieces of false or misleading information. They punished 1708 people, assessed fines of RMB 329 million, and turned over 1702 cases to law enforcement.
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| Propaganda cartoon shows fraudsters adding illegal and low-grade oils to vegetable oil bottles--they're frightened by the assessment of penalties in 2025. |
Highlights of the campaign presented by SAMR included investigations of 10 vegetable oil companies in 5 provinces, special campaigns in Beijing to stop barbecue vendors from using fake meat and to stop false advertising of online meat products, a major case involving production and sale of fake beef, and an investigation of illegal meat in Hubei Province breakfast shops.
Last December SAMR cited several examples of adulteration, false labeling, and trademark infringement for vegetable oils:
- Regulators in Qujing City of Yunnan Province chastised a company that mixed cheap soybean oil in bottles labeled as rapeseed oil. The company also sold bottles labeled as imported olive oil that were filled with olive oil near its expiration date purchased from a local distributor. The company misrepresented the raw materials and production process on labels, and it used another company's label coloring and trademark.
- In Nanning City, Guangxi Province, regulators found bottles of "Sesame Oil Colorant SK-1708" in a company's trash bin. The substance included the dye "Sudan I" that was added to blended vegetable oils for 4 months last year
- A company in Shaanxi Province mixed cottonseed oil into bottles labeled as "pure rapeseed oil" and "first-grade soybean oil." Descriptions of ingredients on the labels were false.
Last September SAMR researchers revealed that their labs have been working to overcome challenges in testing of adulterated and counterfeit meat and vegetable oils. One example they cited was the inability to detect proportions of different types of vegetable oils with indistinguishable fatty acids mixed into expensive olive and camelia oil products. The differing processes used for refining vegetable oils and treatments for color, acid, odor and wax also affect the accuracy of lab analyses.
An SAMR researcher acknowledged that detecting genetically modified oils that are not declared on the label is challenging because the residues that reveal whether oil came from GM seeds are at a very low level, and detecting oil from the numerous types of genetically modified seeds also presents a challenge. A Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences scientist explained that complex oil components inhibit detection of GMOs through the extraction of nucleic acid.
Two years ago there was a scandal in Zhejiang Province about vendors selling skewers of barbecued "lamb" and "beef" that was actually pork, chicken or duck meat treated with dyes and flavorings. After the local SAMR cracked down, a journalist found that vendors guaranteed meat was lamb and beef, but the skewers of meat were from bags produced by a local factory with vague ingredient listings. An SAMR official told the journalist that enforcement is difficult since testing is necessary to determine the type of meat used. A shop owner told the journalist that skewers grilled on the street come from bags, but they skewers served inside the restaurant are made with pure beef or mutton. He explained that the industry is hyper-competitive and no restaurant can survive selling pure mutton or beef.
Last year, a barbecue restaurant in Hangzhou, another city in Zhejiang, was fined for selling lamb and beef skewers that were determined to be made entirely of duck meat after DNA testing. In another case last October, a restaurant in Beijing was fined for selling barbecue skewers made from duck meat.
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| Lamb skewers from a package. Source: Zhejiang Online. |
On a Chinese social media platform a netizen posted a question, "Why is there no news about 'gutter oil' now? Is it because it has disappeared from our lives?" The most plausible response was, "It's not that there isn't any; it's just not enough to shock people." The response cited 2 cases in Sichuan Provine: a January 2026 raid of an illegal facility that had 70 barrels containing 8,500 kg of waste oil from kitchens, and a restaurant busted last year for recycling oil in hot pot meals.
In the SAMR's list of 3 crackdown successes, the Qujing City company was cited for "use of recycled raw materials in food production," which sounds like a euphemism for the use of "gutter oil."
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