He grew up on a sheep farm in southern New Zealand owned by his grandfather, and although the meat was useful, it was really the wool that made money. Now 54, he has the fulfilled air of a scientist who’s made it as an entrepreneur. With enough data, it will reveal the truth about where it’s from – and the lies in the tale being told about it.Į ven as a boy, Frew knew the commercial worth of an origin story. “We can distinguish between two tea estates that just have a dirt road between them.” But really, he added, anything that was once grown or reared will hold signs of its origins, its chemical terroir. “Tea is a good one – it’s very rich in the elements we measure,” Frew told me.
Some items are easier to analyse than others. Oritain promises to determine with 95% accuracy if a coffee bean or a cut of meat is really from the source advertised on its label. All of them are keen to avoid nasty surprises of the kind that Welspun experienced, the kind that can burn up the bottom line or sink a range of products – the low-quality supermarket steak masquerading as prime Welsh beef, say, or the pair of socks that turns out to be made with cotton from Xinjiang, in China, where factories are suspected of using captive labour. The company’s clients include well known brands such as Primark, but also industry bodies such as Cotton USA and Meat Promotion Wales. These deceits, Frew realised, could be sniffed out by element analysis: hence Oritain. Photograph: Steve Gschmeissner/Getty/Science Photo Library RF The central stem of a cotton stem seen under a light micrograph. The counterfeit food game alone is worth $49bn a year.
“New Zealand lamb chops” come from Chinese feedlot animals extra virgin olive oil is cut with cheap, inferior oil T-shirts are stitched out of cotton grown on forced-labour farms. Sugar syrup is blended into organic honey.
But for every headline-grabbing deception, there are countless unnoticed ones. When they’re detected, they trigger fierce controversies, like the time in 2013, when British and Irish authorities found horse meat liberally mixed into “beef” patties. Fraudulent products sit on shop shelves everywhere. Prof Russell Frew, the geochemist who co-founded Oritain, had been studying element analysis at the University of Otago when he recognised how his research could address a major commercial problem. That singular mix of elements works its way into the crops from the region as well, so that cotton grown in the south of the US has a different combination of elements compared to cotton from Egypt – each combination distinct, like a signature. The Earth is so geologically diverse that, in a location’s soil or water, the precise concentrations of elements often turns out to be unique to that region. Its work, which takes us into the heart of modern commerce, depends upon a basic truth about our planet. Founded in 2008, in the town of Dunedin in New Zealand, Oritain is a kind of forensic detective agency – a supply-chain CSI. In the thick of its crisis, Welspun sought out a company named Oritain. A week after Target made its discoveries public, Welspun had lost more than $700m from its market value. Walmart, which was sued by shoppers who had bought Welspun’s “Egyptian cotton” products, refused to stock Welspun sheets any more. Other retailers, checking their bed linen, also found Welspun sheets falsely claiming to be Egyptian cotton. After Target offered its customers refunds and ended its relationship with Welspun, the effects rippled through the industry. In 2016, Target carried out an internal investigation that led to a startling discovery: roughly 750,000 of its Welspun “Egyptian cotton” sheets and pillowcases were made with an inferior kind of cotton that didn’t come from Egypt at all. In Welpsun’s label, the word “Egyptian” was a boast and a promise.īut the label couldn’t always be trusted, it turned out. For decades, cotton from Egypt has claimed a reputation for being the world’s finest, its fibres so long and silky that it can be spun into soft, luxurious cloth. It supplied acres of bed linen to the likes of Walmart and Target, and among the most expensive were those advertised as “100% Egyptian cotton”. At the time, Welspun was manufacturing more than 45m metres of cotton sheets every year – enough to tie a ribbon around the Earth and still have fabric left over for a giant bow. F ive years ago, the textile giant Welspun found itself mired in a scandal that hinged on a single word: “Egyptian”.
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