Russia Says Counterfeit Milk Share Has Fallen From 30% to 0.02%
Russia has reduced the reported share of falsified milk from 30% to 0.02% over four years, according to CRPT Deputy CEO Revaz Yusupov. Digital traceability and regulatory controls have also sharply reduced sales of expired milk and water.
Reported falsification rate falls to 0.02%
The share of falsified milk on Russia’s food market has fallen from 30% four years ago to 0.02% today, TASS reported, citing Revaz Yusupov, deputy chief executive of the Center for Research in Perspective Technologies, or CRPT. He presented the figures during a food security session at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.
Yusupov defined falsification in this context as discrepancies between the raw materials recorded by a producer and the resulting finished dairy product. He attributed the decline to the work of Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia’s agricultural watchdog, alongside other government agencies and the country’s Chestny Znak digital marking and product traceability system. The figures were presented by an executive of the company operating that system; the source material did not provide an independent audit or a breakdown by dairy category, region or producer size.
Controls target expired and unsafe goods
According to Yusupov, the combined enforcement and traceability measures reduced sales of expired milk by a factor of 199 and expired water by a factor of 550. Over the past two and a half years, the system identified 3.7 billion unsafe or substandard products in stores. The reported total covers the wider consumer-goods market rather than milk alone.
Authorities are now focusing on preventing falsified dairy products and water from reaching schools, kindergartens and hospitals. Yusupov said some businesses had attempted to supply such products to these institutions. For dairy processors and distributors, that focus raises the importance of matching procurement records, production volumes and product codes throughout the supply chain. Institutional suppliers face particular exposure because failures can affect large groups of consumers and government purchasing programs.
A broader digital map of the goods market
Chestny Znak currently covers 1.1 million companies across 52 industries, according to the figures presented at the forum. Yusupov said the estimated share of illegal trade across the covered market had declined from 26% to 9% over five years. He described the system as having expanded beyond its original anti-counterfeit role into a digital representation of Russia’s goods economy. It is integrated with 27 federal government agencies and all Russian regions.
Consumer participation has become another part of the control mechanism. The Chestny Znak mobile application has more than 40 million users, while consumers have checked 500 million products and submitted 370,000 complaints. For compliant milk producers, stronger enforcement can reduce competition from suppliers using undeclared ingredients or selling expired goods. Retailers and processors, however, must maintain accurate data across purchasing, production and inventory systems. The reported results suggest traceability is increasingly being used not only to identify individual violations but also to compare physical output with declared raw-material flows.
