The Tomato Paste Fraud Cases: Italy's Ongoing Food Crime Problem

In 2017 and again in 2021, Italian financial police and public-health investigators walked into some of the most respected names in the Italian tomato business and found that the story on the label and the story in the vats did not match. The most prominent case centred on the Petti group in Tuscany, a family firm whose brands trade on Tuscan sunshine and San Marzano heritage. Prosecutors alleged that the company had passed off foreign tomato concentrate — including product from China — as Italian, and had processed low-grade, in some accounts partly spoiled, tomatoes into paste sold as premium regional produce. This was an established industrial player at the heart of the country whose name is a global guarantee of tomato quality — a firm whose labels invoked exactly the Tuscan authenticity the allegations called into question. And it was one visible episode in a fraud so persistent that Italy has a word for the category and a specialised police unit to chase it.

Red gold and the shape of the trade

To see why tomato paste is such fertile ground for fraud, look at what the product actually is. Fresh tomatoes are heavy, fragile and about 95 per cent water. To move tomato value around the world you boil that water off and reduce the fruit to a thick concentrate — tomato paste, sometimes called “red gold” — which is stable, shippable and, crucially, anonymous. A drum of 36-per-cent concentrate does not carry an accent. It does not look Tuscan or Xinjiang-Chinese. It is a reddish-brown industrial commodity, and once it has been reduced, blended, re-diluted and re-canned, its origin lives entirely in the paperwork.

Now add the geography of production. China is the world’s largest producer and exporter of tomato paste, much of it grown in the far-western region of Xinjiang. Italy is a major producer too, especially the south around Naples and the Puglian plains, and Italian brands command a premium precisely because “Italian tomato” means something to shoppers worldwide. The temptation writes itself: import cheap bulk concentrate, re-work it in an Italian factory, and sell it into a market that will pay far more for the word “Italy” on the tin. The physical product supports the deception because concentrate is by nature origin-blind, and the value being sold — Italianness — is a story rather than a molecule.

This is the same structural weakness that let horse pass for beef across Europe’s frozen-food chains: once an ingredient has been processed into an undifferentiated mass, its identity is whatever the invoice says, and invoices can be written to say anything.

What the investigations actually found

The documented cases are more specific than the general suspicion, and worth stating precisely.

The Petti investigation, made public in 2021 after a long inquiry led by prosecutors in Tuscany and reported in detail by Italian and international press, alleged two distinct frauds running together. One was origin fraud: labelling paste as Tuscan or Italian when it was made wholly or partly from imported concentrate, reportedly including Chinese product, moved through the plant to acquire an Italian identity. The other was quality fraud: using poor and, in some accounts, degraded tomatoes and misrepresenting the grade of the finished paste. The company’s president, Pasquale Petti, was among those investigated; the firm disputed the characterisation and the legal process ran its course through the Italian courts, with the company insisting its products were safe and challenging the framing of the allegations. The reason the case mattered beyond one firm is that Petti supplied major supermarket own-label lines across Europe, which meant the alleged mislabelling could sit inside products carrying entirely different, trusted brand names — a shopper reaching for a supermarket’s own Italian passata might have been holding the disputed paste without a Petti label anywhere in sight. That is how origin fraud does its quiet damage: it launders through the anonymity of contract manufacturing, so the consumer never even knows whose product they are eating, let alone where the fruit was grown.

Behind the headline case sits a steadier pattern that Italian authorities have tracked for years. Coldiretti, the Italian farmers’ association, has repeatedly documented the scale of imported concentrate entering Italy and leaving again with an Italian veneer, and has campaigned against what it calls “Italian sounding” fraud — products dressed in tricolour imagery and Italian names that have little Italian content. Investigations have also surfaced adulteration in the narrower sense: paste bulked with additives, thinned, or coloured, and concentrate with quality defects sold as first grade. The Carabinieri’s specialised food-safety command, the NAS, runs a continuous programme of raids and seizures across the sector; tomato fraud is a category of crime the state treats as chronic rather than a scandal that happened once.

The Chinese dimension deserves a fair hearing, because it is the part most prone to distortion. China grows an enormous tomato crop in Xinjiang and processes much of it into bulk concentrate for export, and Italy is one of the destinations. Some of that concentrate is legally imported, re-processed and re-exported, sometimes to Africa and the Middle East, sometimes back into the European market. Investigative reporting — notably the French journalist Jean-Baptiste Malet’s book L’Empire de l’or rouge (The Empire of Red Gold) — traced this global flow in detail, documenting how Italian firms sit at a crossroads of the world tomato trade, importing concentrate, reworking it, and shipping it out again under Italian-branded tins. Malet’s reporting also raised uncomfortable questions about the labour behind some of the Xinjiang crop. The trade is fundamentally legal and vast in scale; the fraud is the thin, deliberate layer of misrepresentation laid over the top of it, where legal reworking shades into an origin claim the fruit cannot honestly support.

The fork: how much is fraud, how much is legal blending

Here the honest account has to slow down, because the popular version — “your Italian tomatoes are secretly Chinese” — flattens a real distinction.

A great deal of foreign concentrate legally enters Italy and is legitimately used. Blending imported and domestic tomato is not in itself a crime; re-processing bulk concentrate into consumer paste is a normal industrial activity, and EU rules on origin labelling for processed foods have historically been loose enough that a product substantially transformed in Italy could, in various periods and categories, be described in ways that emphasise the Italian processing. The line between legal blending under permissive labelling rules and criminal misrepresentation is genuinely narrow, and it is where most of the argument lives. A tin that says “made in Italy” may be telling the literal truth about where it was canned while saying nothing honest about where the fruit grew. That is not necessarily fraud in the courtroom sense. It is often the labelling law working exactly as written, which is its own kind of problem.

So the fork runs two ways. Popular belief overreaches when it treats every drum of Chinese concentrate in an Italian port as a scandal; much of it is a legal commodity feeding a legal industry. But the industry, and the softness of the rules, also created exactly the cover under which real fraud like the alleged Petti scheme could operate, because when legal blending and criminal passing-off look identical on the shelf, the shopper cannot tell them apart and neither, sometimes, can the retailer. The scandal is not that foreign tomato exists in the supply. It is that the system is built so that you cannot know what you are buying, and that opacity is worth money to whoever sits in the middle of it.

Why Italy, and why it never quite ends

There is something almost poignant in the fact that the country most associated with honest, sun-grown tomatoes is also the epicentre of tomato fraud. The two facts are the same fact. Fraud always clusters where authenticity carries the biggest premium. Nobody bothers to counterfeit a product that is cheap and unloved; they counterfeit the thing whose reputation is worth stealing. Italy is defrauded in tomatoes for the same reason its olive oil is routinely adulterated and its honey is laundered through third countries: the Italian name is one of the most valuable assurances in food, and value is what fraud feeds on.

The persistence of the crime, decade after decade, tells you it is not a matter of a few bad actors who can be arrested away. It is structural. As long as the price gap between “Italian tomato” and “tomato” is large, as long as concentrate is an origin-blind commodity, and as long as labelling rules let processing stand in for provenance, the incentive to close that gap dishonestly regenerates faster than any prosecution can remove it. Italy’s NAS raids and Coldiretti’s campaigns are not failing; they are running a permanent maintenance operation against a pressure that never lets up, in the same way Italy’s food-crime problem mirrors the middleman failures seen in food chains the world over.

What the tin really tells you

The tomato-paste cases rarely involve poison. Nobody was hospitalised by the Petti allegations the way infants were by melamine. The harm is subtler and, in its way, more corrosive: it is the slow hollowing of the one thing a food brand is supposed to sell, which is the ability to trust that the word on the front means what you think it means.

What the affair really exposes is how much of the value in food is a story, and how easily a story can be detached from the object it is supposed to describe. When you pay extra for Tuscan tomato, you are paying for a narrative of place, sunlight and tradition, and that narrative is far more portable than any tomato — it can be printed onto a tin filled with concentrate that crossed two continents. The people who ran the honest side of the Italian tomato business are as wronged by this as the shoppers, because the fraud debases the very reputation their real work built.

There is a practical lesson buried in it, too, for anyone who cares what they eat. Origin, on a tin of paste, is close to unverifiable by the shopper; the surest signals of a real tomato are the ones fraud finds hardest to fake at scale — a named growing region tied to a protected designation such as Pomodoro San Marzano dell’Agro Sarnese-Nocerino DOP, a short and traceable supply chain, a price that reflects the cost of actually growing and canning tomatoes in Italy rather than reworking cheap concentrate. None of these is proof, and consorzio certification marks have themselves been counterfeited. But they raise the cost of deception, and raising the cost of deception is the only durable defence a market has, because the incentive to cheat never disappears while the premium exists.

The point of documenting these cases carefully, with their dates and firm names and disputed defences, is not to reach a verdict that Italian food is a lie. Italian food is, for the most part, exactly as good as its reputation, which is precisely why the reputation is worth stealing. The point is to hold in view how a global supply chain can take something as concrete as a sun-ripened tomato, boil it down to an anonymous red paste, and sell you back the idea of the tomato while the tomato itself came from somewhere you will never be told.