An in-depth investigation by Abi Kay has revealed that a food manufacturer was passing off huge quantities of foreign pork as British
Reprinted with kind permission from Farmers Weekly
British farmers are being ripped off by an industrial-scale country-of-origin fraud in a scandal that has engulfed almost the entire food retail sector, as well as some major food service outlets.
An in-depth investigation by Farmers Weekly has revealed that up until at least the end of 2020, a food manufacturer was passing off huge quantities of foreign pork – sometimes tens of thousands of tonnes a week – as British.
See also: Farming Weekly Editor’s view: Meat trade duping us daily and that must end
The processor, which cannot be named for legal reasons, has also been accused by former employees of regularly “washing” hams that are visibly off, or mixing rotting pork with fresh product for further processing.
Other products such as ox tongues were not heat treated properly, and meat was sometimes thawed out on the factory floor, posing a serious food safety risk.
Two former employees also said the paperwork for sampling, which would pick up bacteria such as listeria and E coli, was falsified.
Wake-up Call
Industry leaders approached for comment have said Farmers Weekly’sinvestigation should act as a “wake-up call” for the sector and questioned the response of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and National Food Crime Unit (NFCU).
Both bodies have been aware of the activities taking place at the processor since 2020, but at least one source claimed to have sent photographs and information about the practices to the FSA several years before that.
Meat processed by the company ended up in products such as ready meals, quiches, sandwiches and other produce sold in Tesco, Asda, Co-op, Morrisons and Marks & Spencer.
Food manufacturer and distributor Oscar Mayer, which supplies Sainsbury’s, Aldi, Ikea, Subway and airline food producer Dnata, was another customer, as were major brands Princes and BidFood.
Bakkavor was a customer until 2019.
Schools, hospitals, care homes and prisons were also indirectly supplied, with one source alleging the most rotten meat would end up there.
“I used to tell them about it,” they said. “I used to [say] ‘you can’t do this’. [The reply was] ‘Do you want the effing job? Get back in there’.”
Audit Deception
There is no suggestion that any of the processor’s customers were aware of the criminal practices, which took place for at least two decades and very likely beyond 2020, as auditors who visited the site were deceived.
One former employee said: “They did surprise audits, but they’ve got 15 minutes to be in. I’ve been there before when that’s happened.
“It was 6 am and they’re knocking on the front door to come in. The first thing they do is bring them in, give them a cup of tea.
“By that time, there’s a text message come down to one of the phones [and] everybody is on the job, pushing stuff onto lorries, getting rid of them. So when they walk in, it’s all nice.”
Another source said if the meat was not hidden on lorries, employees would push any suspect product around the top of the circle-shaped factory.
“The auditor would be walking round with the management and they would get employees to push it round at the same time, so they never met it,” they said.
Prior to 2018, some of the meat that wasn’t seen by auditors would be hidden in a secret chiller, but its location was eventually reported to authorities, which forced the processor to put it on the site plan.
This incident led to “a lot of supplier audits”, according to one source.
Ex-workers Speak Out
Almost all of the former employees Farmers Weekly has spoken to said country-of-origin fraud was embedded in the company’s operating model.
“It was all one big fiddle,” said a source,
The business would buy a relatively small volume of British meat from a retailer-approved supplier, then use the traceability information from this delivery for all the products it made in that week – with the majority coming from elsewhere in the world.
One source said they were 100% confident that all the retailers the company supplied have been victims of country-of-origin fraud.
For pork, the price differential between British and imported product could be as high as a few pounds a kilo.
Another former employee claimed, at one point, EU bacon medallions were being bought at £1/kg and sold on, as British, for about £12/kg.
Farmers Weekly has seen evidence that showed Danish pork, which was only allowed to be sold on the mainland of China, was delivered to the factory.
Other products, such as ox tongue sold direct to Morrisons, were subject to the same fraud.
A source said: “What they are supposed to do is buy it from Woodheads [Brothers Meat Company]. They are basically owned by Morrisons.
“We would then buy that ox tongue to send them, but then also we could buy a small bit from other approved suppliers.
“Obviously, the UK is expensive, but Ireland would be cheaper. So all they would do is buy some from Ireland that is not approved and mix it in with the Woodheads. But then on the traceability again, everything would say Woodheads.”