Duped: ABC 4Corners - Food Exposed, and the question that needs to be answered

We watched ABC Four Corners "Duped: Food Exposed" last night.

Part 1?!

That is the first thing worth sitting with. Part 1. Part 2 airs Monday 3 August. There is more coming.

This is Adele Ferguson and the team behind the childcare investigation, teamed up with forensic food scientists, eight months in, with laboratory testing commissioned on everyday supermarket products. Not vox pops. Not a scandal that surfaced and got chased. Commissioned forensic testing of things already sitting in Australian pantries.

The findings run to food authenticity, misleading origin claims and undeclared ingredients in common items. The ABC's own framing is blunt: food fraud is easy to commit, hard to detect, and worth billions.

But the thing that stayed with us afterwards was not any single product or any single company. It was the sound of the buck being passed.

Retailer points at the wholesaler. Wholesaler points at the importer. Importer points at the manufacturer. Manufacturer points at the standard. The standard points at the state. And somewhere at the end of that chain is a person putting food on a table.

The part that should worry marketers

Here is the angle that has not had enough air time yet.

Misleading origin claims and undeclared ingredients are not only food safety issues. They are advertising claims. Country of origin statements sit under the Australian Consumer Law and the Country of Origin Food Labelling Information Standard, policed by the ACCC. Ingredient and composition claims sit under the Food Standards Code. Health and nutrition claims layer on top of both. Every one of those ends up on a pack, in a social ad, on a shelf talker, in a retail media placement.

And almost none of it is verified by the person writing the copy.

A brand team writes "Product of Australia" because the supplier declaration says so. A brand team writes "100% extra virgin olive oil" or "single origin" because the spec sheet says so. That claim then gets amplified across paid, owned and earned channels by people who have never seen the lab result and had no realistic way of getting one.

If the supply chain has been adulterated upstream, the marketer has made a false or misleading claim without knowing it. Under the Australian Consumer Law, not knowing is not a defence. Section 18 does not require intent. The claim is either misleading or it is not.

That is the exposure. It is not theoretical, and it does not sit with the fraudster. It sits with the brand whose name is on the front of the pack.

The system is not one system

Most people assume Australia has a food regulator. It does not, at least not in the way people imagine.

FSANZ writes the Food Standards Code. It does not enforce it. Enforcement sits with state and territory health and food authorities, each with their own resourcing, priorities and appetite. Imported food is screened at the border on a risk-based sampling basis, which by definition means most of it is not screened. Origin and composition claims can also fall under the ACCC and Ad Standards depending on how they are made.

That is at least four different bodies, two levels of government, and a set of voluntary industry codes sitting in the gaps between them.

None of them is lying when they say it is not their job. That is the problem. The gap is structural, not personal. And a structural gap is exactly the kind of thing an eight-month investigation with a laboratory budget walks straight through.

Infant formula: the gap we can already see

The infant formula position is the clearest live example of what a gap looks like.

For years, marketing of infant formula in Australia was governed by the MAIF Agreement, a voluntary code signed by manufacturers and importers and authorised by the ACCC. Self-regulation, with all the strengths and weaknesses that implies.

MAIF has not been continued. The Department of Health has been consulting on stricter, more formal restrictions to replace it. Industry, including the Infant Nutrition Council, asked for MAIF to be extended as a bridge until the tougher framework was ready. That request was not granted.

So the position today is that the voluntary code has lapsed and the replacement is not yet in force. Whatever you thought of MAIF's strength, a gap is a gap. For a product category marketed to new parents, that is not a comfortable place to be standing while a two-part national investigation runs.

Alcohol, and where ABAC actually reaches

The alcohol material in Part 1 leaned toward illegal product and ethanol rather than marketing conduct. Worth being precise about that, because it matters for what ABAC can and cannot do.

ABAC governs how alcohol is marketed. It does not govern what is in the bottle, who made it, or whether it entered the country lawfully. If a product is illegal at source, a marketing code was never the control designed to catch it, and criticising ABAC for missing it is aiming at the wrong target.

But there is a knock-on effect for legitimate operators. When a category attracts this kind of coverage, scrutiny does not stay neatly inside the part of the category that caused it. Compliant producers get swept into the same news cycle, the same parliamentary questions, and the same regulatory tightening.

Where we think this goes

Eating is not optional. That is what makes this different from most compliance stories.

Our read, and it depends heavily on what Part 2 reveals on 3 August, is that the range of outcomes runs from tougher enforcement powers and materially larger penalties at the mild end, through to a Royal Commission into the food supply chain at the serious end. A Royal Commission would examine how non-compliant and unregulated product gets within reach of a dinner table at all, and it would not confine itself to the companies named on screen.

Ferguson's childcare work is the precedent worth noting here. That one did not stop at the broadcast.

Neither end of that range is a marketing problem. Both ends are governance problems.

The question we were left with

Here is the one we have not been able to put down.

Should food manufacturers sit on regulatory boards with voting rights, or should they be brought into the process as expertise, on request, when it is needed?

The case for a seat at the table is real. You cannot write a workable standard without understanding manufacturing tolerances, supply chain realities, shelf life, testing capability and cost. Standards written without that knowledge get ignored, litigated, or quietly unenforced. Industry expertise on a board is not automatically capture. It is often the difference between a rule that works and a rule that looks good in a press release.

The case against is equally real. Voting rights are not the same as being heard. A vote is a lever over the rule that governs you. Even where every individual acts with complete integrity, the perception problem alone corrodes public trust, and trust is the entire currency a food regulator runs on. When something goes wrong, the first question the public asks is who was in the room, and the second is whether they had a hand in writing the rule that was broken.

Where we land, tentatively, is this: expertise in, votes out. Bring industry in early, formally and often. Publish the submissions. Publish who was consulted and on what. But keep the final vote with people who hold no commercial position in the outcome.

We hold that view loosely. There are people who have spent careers inside this system who would tell us we are naive, and they may be right. Standards bodies that lock industry out have their own well-documented failure modes.

So we will ask it straight. Where do you sit on that fence?

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Source: ABC Four Corners, "Duped: Food Exposed" Part 1, reported by Adele Ferguson, aired 27 July 2026. Part 2 airs 3 August 2026 on ABC TV and iview.