On New Year’s Eve, the SHOT CHECK project together with Roskachestvo tested a traditional holiday dish – red caviar. The manufacturers were different. The results were alarming: E. coli and other pathogens were found in some jars.
Which caviar was blacklisted?
In total, Roskachestvo specialists checked 24 trademarks based on 37 quality and safety indicators. Products were purchased both packaged and by weight. Experts checked the caviar for taste, smell, consistency, type of eggs, and the presence of foreign impurities.
An alien sour odor was found in one sample. Six products tasted bitter or pungent or tasted like oxidized oil (products containing E. coli were not taste tested). Eight products had discrepancies in caviar consistency.
![Results of the examination conducted by Roskachestvo](https://ruscrime.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1703762136_3_Poison-for-the-New-Year-Who-makes-dangerous-red-caviar.png)
![Results of the examination conducted by Roskachestvo](https://ruscrime.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1703762136_412_Poison-for-the-New-Year-Who-makes-dangerous-red-caviar.png)
![Results of the examination conducted by Roskachestvo](https://ruscrime.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1703762136_578_Poison-for-the-New-Year-Who-makes-dangerous-red-caviar.png)
How red caviar is faked
Experts said that unscrupulous businessmen have long learned to make excess profits from the delicacy – there are a lot of ways: for example, frozen caviar can be passed off as freshly produced, pouring soda on the eggs so that they swell and “straighten up”, in addition, a lot, sometimes, ” diluted” with either cheaper caviar or vegetable oil – and these are the most harmless ways to deceive the buyer.
There are also such concepts as structured and simulated caviar. The first is made from the juice of burst eggs. In this case, the shell is recreated using gelling components (mainly gelatin). Sometimes flavorings and dyes are used to obtain a product more similar to natural caviar.
Imitated caviar is most often produced from brown algae. A colored and flavored solution is dripped from them into another solution – calcium chloride, and voila – round “eggs” are formed in the liquid, very similar in appearance to natural caviar. To give it a similar taste, the seaweed solution is boiled in fish broth. There is no harm from such caviar, but it will not provide aesthetic pleasure either.
According to the rules, such products should be labeled, because in the classical sense they are not caviar, but producers do not always do this. At the same time, there are also outright scammers who, under the guise of caviar, pour inedible and sometimes hazardous to health rubbish into jars. Usually it is sold in cans, because the buyer will be able to visually assess the quality of the product after purchase.
Over the past year and a half alone, more than two hundred tons of contraband and dangerous counterfeit goods have been seized from the shelves of Russian stores and markets. Regulators regularly check the products of caviar producers, but on major holidays, especially such as New Year, counterfeit products become especially numerous.
What caught the SHOT CHECK
All caviar purchased by journalists, except for the market one, was packaged in high-quality containers with thoughtful, attractive labels that instilled confidence in the buyer, because they displayed complete information about both the quality of the product and its manufacturer. Among them were recognizable green tin cans.
Older people usually “buy” into them. They have known these since the times of the USSR – then the famous green can was not only the personification of the word “delicacy”, but also, along with a bottle of foreign cognac, very hard currency for bribe takers. Now they often don’t even smell like caviar.
One of these cans was released under the Forward-S brand, and if the copy of SHOT CHECK still turned out to be edible, then on the regulator’s website, Internet users who bought this “caviar” complain that the contents of the cans smell like machine oil or even gasoline, and taste bitter or sour , after tasting, the bitterness lingers in the throat for a long time. Some people even came across natural pieces of plastic in the gelatinous liquid.
![Readers of the Roskontrol website also do not like Forward-S products.](https://ruscrime.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1703762136_811_Poison-for-the-New-Year-Who-makes-dangerous-red-caviar.png)
![](https://ruscrime.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1703762137_564_Poison-for-the-New-Year-Who-makes-dangerous-red-caviar.png)
Who produces counterfeit goods
The story with Forward-S products is complicated and may soon become a subject of interest to law enforcement agencies.
The tin contains information about the manufacturer: LLC “13”, located at Kamchatka Territory, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Dovatora Street, building 30, is a small residential building in the private sector of the Kamchatka capital.
There is information about such a company in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities – it appeared in November 2013. At the same time, it received three certificates for the production of caviar from fish of the salmon family, as well as its packaging in tin containers.
Then the mysticism begins, because the company closed six years ago, after operating for only four years. Judging by the financial statements, for at least the last two years LLC “13” did not work – a nominal 10 thousand rubles lay idle on the company’s accounts – this is the amount of the authorized capital.
![The owner and general director of the company "13" Dmitry Galan prefers to fish in the Dominican Republic - he has already gone there several times](https://ruscrime.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1703762137_827_Poison-for-the-New-Year-Who-makes-dangerous-red-caviar.png)
The sole owner and general director is a certain Dmitry Galan from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the company is registered at his home address. In the notebooks of his contacts he is recorded as Dima Ikra Master. However, before this enterprise he had never participated in business, he did not have an individual entrepreneur, and he was not listed as self-employed.
In 2016–2018, he lived in Moscow, and around the same time, the FSSP initiated enforcement proceedings against him for debts amounting to just over 200 thousand rubles. Now Galan, judging by new cases, does not pay traffic police fines in Tomsk.
It is interesting that in the same place – in Kamchatka – there is the same LLC “13” with an authorized capital of more than 6 million rubles, which is engaged in the production of caviar and has received the same certificates as the Galan company. The legal address, however, is located near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky – in the village of Svetly, Elizovsky district. The company was founded back in 1995, went through bankruptcy in 2010 and is now listed as operating again.
![Two LLC "13". This is a defunct company whose data can still be found on banks for sale.](https://ruscrime.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1703762137_982_Poison-for-the-New-Year-Who-makes-dangerous-red-caviar.png)
![This is also "13". With the same field of activity, with the same certificates. On paper the company is active, but in reality it seems not](https://ruscrime.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1703762137_949_Poison-for-the-New-Year-Who-makes-dangerous-red-caviar.png)
True, “13” does not seem to be conducting any real activities: according to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the company does not have its own property, the latest financial statements were presented with zero figures, and at the end of last year there were no more than 374 thousand rubles in its accounts.
The sole owner and general director is Victor Gorlina well-known businessman in Kamchatka and a motor fuel dealer.