One company name appeared multiple times as a recipient in the data. It was Antonio Petti, who was part of a group of large Italian tomato processing firms. From 2020 to 2023, it received more than 36 million kg of tomato paste from Xinjiang Guannong and its subsidiaries.
The Petti Group produces tomato products under its own name, but also supplies others to supermarkets across Europe, which sell them under their own brands.
Our study tested 64 different tomato purees sold in the UK, Germany and the US, comparing them in the laboratory with samples from China and Italy. These included leading Italian brands and supermarket own brands, and many were produced by Petti.
We asked Source Certain, a world-renowned provenance testing firm based in Australia, to find out if the claims of origin on puree labels are accurate. The company began by creating what its CEO, Cameron Scudding, calls a “fingerprint” unique to the country of origin — an analysis of the trace elements the tomatoes pick up from local water and rocks.
“The first goal for us was to determine what the baseline micronutrient profile would look like for China and (what) the likely profile would look like for Italy. We found that they are very clear,” he said.
Source Certain then compared the profiles of those countries to the 64 tomato purees we wanted to test — most of which claimed to contain Italian tomatoes or gave the impression that they did — and a few that didn’t confirm the origin.
The lab results showed that many of these products did contain Italian tomatoes – including all those sold in the US, leading Italian brands including Mutti and Napolina, and some German and British supermarket own brands, including those sold Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer.
But 17 appear to have contained Chinese tomatoes, 10 of which are made by Petti, an Italian company we discovered appearing repeatedly in international shipments.
Of the 10 produced by Petti, these were sold in UK supermarkets at the time of testing between April and August 2024:
