A recent study released by Food Sentry, LLC has shed light on the countries with the most food safety violations in 2013 and the most common types of violations found around the world.

Food sentry is a global food monitoring service that provides product safety information to help consumers make educated choices when they select their food.

The study included a year’s worth of analysis on global food violation incident data. According to Food Sentry, the data was gathered from the US, EU, and Japanese regulatory entities, among others.

“Food safety violations are nothing new,” says Zak Solomon, Food Sentry senior intelligence analyst. “They’ve just been receiving a lot of attention lately and rightly so. We import from every single one of the countries in the top 10, and, in fact, the US is among the most common violators. Clearly understanding food safety from a global perspective is immensely important.”

In order of frequency, the top 10 countries that were the sources of the most violative products in 2013 were: India, China, Mexico, France, United States, Vietnam, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Turkey and Spain.

Researchers also studied the specific food safety violations. Among the possible infractions, “excessive or illegal pesticide contamination” was the root of more than a third of the incidents.

Seafood accounted for the most violations with 23.5 percent. It was followed by vegetables, fruits and herbs/spices.

Other issues found with the food were pathogenic contamination (22 percent), excessive filth and unsanitary conditions (15.7 percent) and excessive mycotoxin contamination (10.2 percent).

Food Sentry says it will continue to explore the frequent violators in subsequent reports to find possible causes for the problems.