Consumers Can Help to Avoid Meat Mixing Repeat

Processing and retail sectors have received much adverse attention following the discovery of imported orvine and porcine DNA in products labelled ‘beef’ being sold in large UK supermarket chains.

The incident centred on Silvercrest foods and Liffey Foods, companies based in the Republic of Ireland (ROI) - outside the UK.

The perennial issue of the long term discounting of Northern Ireland (NI) beef has consequently been raised. The market inequality, which farm groups say amounts to a 10 per cent deduction, is due to mixing concerns regarding animals of NI and ROI identity making proper labelling difficult.

The National Farmers Union and levy funded development board EBLEX have stressed the importance of accurate labelling schemes such as Red Tractor and Quality Standard Mark to farmers' margins.

Both organisations have expressed annoyance at the possibility of high welfare farming systems being let down by errors further down the supply chain.

In addition to more accurate labelling, the National Beef Association (NBA) Chairman for Northern Ireland, Oisin Murnion has said the industry would benefit from a more discerning customer.

Consumers have been requested to read labelling carefully to distinguish whether a product is from the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland. The NBA has assured that a product with the Red Tractor and the Farm Quality Assurance Scheme marks have NI provenance.

“Our concern about the Red Tractor logo and FQAS follows an announcement by Sainsbury’s that the Red Tractor is to be taken off its labels.”

“We are, therefore, urging every supermarket chain, small, medium or large, to make every effort to ensure that country of origin in particular is not compromised and our hope is that consumers will be backing our efforts on this too,” Mr Murnion added.”

Drives for refocused attention to product labelling have been justified by the NBA. They stated that their farmers have the most stringent cattle tracing system in Europe and raise animals within the toughest farm assurance demands.

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland, the Food Standards Agency and Defra have all said they will work with the industry in a big to track at what point mistakes in the chain were made.

Another response has been the inclusion of horse meat testing in a meat speciation study being carried out at Leatherhead Food Research.