This one? Good luck with that.

This government are against any regulation if they can get away with it. New Labour are not much better. Old labour might have been more willing to regulate but they are no where to be found.

What we need are much tougher fines to make the impact of such a failing to be so damaging to the company that the costs of better compliance are not considered unnecessary. If there were a twelve month ban on all advertising by the company as they would have been fraudulently advertising horse meat as beef, then the company could find that they are unable to advertise car insurance or sponsor an event that the impact will be proportionate with what their failings.

What we need really is the notion that you can't pass off responsibility for the product you sell. Findus are claiming they were lied to and bought the raw material in good faith. That's fine, as far as it goes. I suspect however that Findus actually just looked at how low the bill was, figured out how much extra profit that would mean and didn't ask any awkward questions.

It should be the case that if a product has your name on it, it is up to you to ensure all the ingredients within it are what you say they are and meet all the relevant legal requirements, not that you just take someone else's word for it. And if they aren't, it's your problem because you didn't do that, so you can't just say "Oh it's our supplier's fault" and basically abdicate all responsibility.

Jon

Considering the EU directives and regulations that concern food production, labelling plus the BRC inspections not withstanding other audit groups from sainsbury, tescoes, M&S etc there is really not much the retailers could have done when faced with what looks like concerted fraud. If the paperwork is all in order and appears to valid.

To test for something like horse DNA you would need to have a reason adding testing to satisfy the media faux outrage would cost an excessive amount.

As I say, the solution is positive responsibility. If you sell something labelled as X, that means you say it is X, which means you've checked it is X. Not that somebody else sold it to you saying it was X and you took their word for it. If you want to call something 'beef lasange' you make sure what you're putting in it is beef and if that costs you a few extra pennies per packet then tough luck.


To be fair, the argument is that if they have to think of everything that might not be beef in there and test for it, that will be lots of tests and very expensive. Which is fair enough. However, some of the foods that have been withdrawn have had no beef in them at all. I strongly suspect one single test (i.e. 'is it beef'?) would have spotted that. That's all that's required. One test per batch of ingredient that says 'is this what it claims to be'. That's a fair requirement to ask for. The foods they've found only traces of other materials in are a more understandable case - we all accept that some level of cross contamination is almost impossible to eradicate; e.g. 'this item may contains traces of nut' in packets of crisps or what have you. However to sell something that simply contains an entirely different ingredient and think that 'Oh, well they said it was fine' gets you of it... not good enough.

Yes but that would not be stopped by such a draconian advertising ban. A huge fine and advertising ban would force companies to deal with their suppliers and their own quality control. They might sack buyers, or anyone within the company involved to set examples and then deal with the mess that they have created. Accountability is crucial. First stop is the retailer, then the manufacturer and so on down the supply chain. They could sue their suppliers for damages and so financially pass the burden to the manufacturers to ensure the contents are correct. The solution might be to stop the export of processed meat and only allow live animals and whole frozen carcasses.

Tengelmann have pulled their frozen lasagne from shelves, as a precaution.

The article I read didn't say whether they used the same processor as Findus...

French stores have been impacted as well.

Somewhere else I read that it was organised crime that substituted horse meat for beef in processing factories.

They could always hide them in burgers. No,wait...



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Wait, there's more...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21418342

Interesting that the Findus and Tesco Value meals come from the same factory!

Chances are that all their customers have been affected.

no I mean that Tesco's Cheapest and Findus Finest are probably the same product

'Findus Finest' is very much 'tallest dwarf'.

Well we know it has the same ingredients now.