A leading food safety expert has warned that the UK could be ripe for major food scandals, after a supplier allegedly sold rotting pork to supermarkets.
Chris Elliott, Professor of Food Safety and Microbiology at Queen’s University Belfast, believes recent pressures including the coronavirus pandemic, Brexit and the invasion of Ukraine means companies may be more likely to cut corners.
He said: “There’s cost pressures across the UK food industry due to all of these things. We’ve also had dramatic cuts in government funding for food inspections.
“The current situation with the cost of living crisis, coupled with customers wanting to make their money stretch further and get the best quality for their money, could also create a potential storm of food fraud and we could see more of this.
“I warned a few months ago that something like this could happen because of all of those factors - all of them coming together gives a lot of opportunity for people to cheat, and this pork case is a great example of it.”
Ten years ago, Professor Elliott led the inquiry into the ‘horse meat’ scandal, where foods including supermarket ready meals advertised as containing spicy beef actually had horse meat in them.
The latest transgression concerns a supplier based in the Midlands, who currently cannot be named for legal reasons.
The alleged rogue traders have been accused of selling rotten pork meat in an investigation by trade magazine Farmers Weekly, who say the decaying pork was mixed with fresh meat before it was processed and sold on.
A source told the publication that most of the ‘rotten’ meat would be sent to schools, hospitals, prisons and care homes, with the alleged criminal practices potentially going on for at least two decades and continuing to beyond 2020.
It’s also been alleged that frozen meat was occasionally thawed out on the factory floor by the company, falsifying paperwork and that they also may have sold pork fraudulently labelled as British when it was actually from foreign sources.
Meat produced by the company is reported to have ended up in products such as ready meals, quiches, sandwiches and other produce sold in Tesco, Asda, Co-op and Morrisons.
Retailers only became aware of the allegations of rotten meat in the supply chain on Wednesday, when Farmers Weekly published the article.
Another company that used the supplier was the food manufacturer Oscar Mayer, whose clients include Sainsbury’s, Aldi, Ikea and Subway.
Concerned retailers said they were “double checking” that none of the factory’s products remained on shelves or in supply chains.
Professor Elliott added: “I have heard the company has gone into liquidation and a lot of the meat on the premises has disappeared, nobody knows what has happened to it, so there is a potential risk it may end up in a supply chain somewhere.”
Last week, three arrests were made at the firm’s factory during a raid by police and trading standards officers.
The arrests were linked to alleged mislabelling of foreign-sourced meat as British produce, but the Food Standards Agency has confirmed that its National Food Crime Unit is also looking into “potential food hygiene breaches”.
Darren Davies, head of the National Food Crime Unit, said: “The FSA’s National Food Crime Unit is carrying out a criminal investigation into how a supplier was allegedly providing products labelled as British when they were in fact sourced from elsewhere.
“This is a complex and live investigation and we are looking into all new lines of enquiry with our partner organisations, including any potential food hygiene breaches at the premises. If any evidence of a food safety risk is found, then necessary action will be taken.”
Professor Elliott added: “Most people who set out to cheat in the food sector do this by making false claims of country of origin.
“That’s an important issue, but food safety concerns are a lot more important. There’s the potential that the company in question has caused illness to a large number of people. We really don’t know the scale of the problem they have caused.”
