In the UK, on ​​the trail of haute cuisine thieves

Chris Swales, 54, a confident smoked salmon producer with a three-day beard, stands on this October day in 2024 at the entrance to an industrial site in East London, examining containers. Around him, teenagers loiter, battered cars, mastiffs, and passersby who all seem to own more than one phone. A strange place to deliver nine pallets of frozen fish, he thinks. But Chris Swales has checked the address the courier dictated to him: it's definitely here.

Just a few months ago, Swales would never have imagined venturing into the Walthamstow area on the trail of 37,000 pounds [44,000 euros] worth of missing salmon. It all started in August, with an email with the subject line “Collaboration” from a certain Patrick Moulin, who presented himself as a buyer for the French supermarket chain Match. Moulin was looking for a regular supplier of smoked salmon, and so he approached Chris Swales's company, Chapel and Swan Smokehouse, based in Exning, Suffolk [east coast of England].

These are large orders. Not colossal, certainly, but to fulfill them, Swales has to reorganize the entire production schedule of his 10-person team. Over the next few weeks, everyone works flat out to produce the smoked fish slabs, freeze them, and store them in a warehouse until the entire order is ready. Shortly after, Chris Swales receives notification of the goods' collection, and the necessary documents are signed.

Two weeks later, the company manager still hadn't received the payment. He followed up with his client, but when Moulin asked to defer payment until he received a second order of smoked salmon (another £55,000), Swales put a stop to it. “There was no way I was going to accept that.” And from there, nothing more was heard.

Patrick Moulin has gone missing. So Swales calls Match headquarters directly to be put in touch with the buyer. "Oh, but we don't have anyone named Moulin," he hears his interlocutor reply.

“I was furious that I’d been had,” says Chris Swales. “And then a whole bunch of similar stories started coming out…”

In late October 2024, it was revealed that Neal's Yard Dairy, one of the UK's most renowned suppliers of artisanal cheese, had been the victim of a major scam. A fraudulent buyer, posing, much like "Patrick Moulin," as a representative of a major French retailer, had ordered 22 tons of award-winning cheddar. 950 wheels of cloth-rind cheese, including Hafod, Westcombe, and Pitchfork cheddars, worth a total of £300,000 [€355,000], were delivered to a London warehouse. And when Neal's Yard realized the buyer wasn't who he claimed to be, it was too late.

The case of the stolen cheddars is causing a stir all over the world.

This is because such a crime has something to strike the imagination. The case arouses indignation (a friendly independent business taken for a ride), but it also has something to amuse (it's a scenario worthy of Wallace and Gromit ).

Food theft is often seen as trivial, but in this case, the scale of the theft changes everything. Even as shoplifting reaches levels not seen in twenty years, well-organized criminals are targeting entire shipments of fine foods—and in the process, reaffirming the value of goods that are too often overlooked. These criminals are highly knowledgeable about both the food industry and the products themselves, and they clearly have the means to sell their loot on the black market, through channels that fly under the radar.

According to a report by the British Standards Institute, the national standards body, food is the type of raw material “most exposed to the risk of theft in global supply chains” , and the damage is