Protecting Consumer Choice: Ensuring the Provenance of Artisan Foods Produced on the island of Ireland

The provenance of processed foods is a significant quality attribute for many consumers. However, widespread mislabelling or adulteration of high-value foods is known to take place on a global scale and, with regard to Irish farmhouse cheeses, it is believed that the mislabelling of imported foreign cheeses as Irish does happen and may be a growing problem. There is also concern that not all cheeses sold with Irish-sounding brand names originate on the island of Ireland. An analytical effort is therefore warranted to facilitate the development of methods to confirm the "Irish origin" claims of such products.

This project, which is a collaboration between Teagasc Food Research Centre, Ashtown and the Institute for Global Food Security in Queen’s University Belfast, aims to develop a robust fingerprint model which will characterise Irish-produced farmhouse cheeses using these analytical approaches. The possibility of labelling solutions to augment consumer choice will also be explored.