The Grocer – 13 January 2018

food safety

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opponents in the House of Commons, retailers began
to pick up the pieces of their damaged reputations. The
blow had been severe. By February 2013 three-quarters
of consumers felt less confident in the safety of pro-
cessed meat, 49% were planning on cutting back on red
meat, and 79% were convinced horse had been hiding
in their burgers for years, according to research at the
time by Harris Interactive.

Restoring reputations

It was a long slog restoring that tattered trust. Opie and
the BRC worked closely with retailers to improve intel-
ligence gathering, Tesco promised new testing regimes
and Waitrose committed to a new in-house production
unit. The FDF developed and distributed new guides on
food authenticity to suppliers, establishing new regu-
latory and technical committees too.
A longer term trend toward British meat began, too.
“People could trust their burgers, and so it did the inde-
pendent sector an enormous amount of good, most of
which has been sustained subsequently and built on,”
says Bagley.
And the aggressive buying practices flagged up by
Professor Elliott in his September 2014 report have
been put under the spotlight, following the creation
of the Groceries Code Adjudicator role only days after
the scandal broke.
It had been in June 2013 that Paterson announced
Elliott as the man to lead an independent and wide-
reaching inquiry into how the industry had become

vulnerable to fraud in the first place. Over the course

of 12 months Elliott worked up to 90 hours per week

interviewing and visiting hundreds of businesses the

length and breadth of the UK.

“It just completely subsumed me,” he says. “I was

taken aback by how complex things really were. I knew

food systems were complex but I didn’t really under-

stand the full complexity of what was going on and the

multitude of stakeholders involved.

“The fact was, it was something that involved nearly

four million people in the UK and was worth £100bn

plus. Can you imagine the vested interests that sit

behind all of this?”

Food crime

Through it all Elliott, backed up by Paterson, insisted

on talking about ‘food crime’ – a term that hadn’t

existed before Horsegate but now throws up 75,000

search results on Google – despite “a lot of resistance

in government”.

“When I talked to people about ‘food fraud’ they

thought it was quite trivial, like a local butcher sprin-

kling sawdust into his sausages, but I was trying to get

across that this was criminal activity, this is people

destroying businesses, threatening the safety and well-

being of consumers. It was extremely controversial.”

As were some of his findings (see box), with the

interim report in December 2013 labelled ‘explosive’.

Industry figures such as Opie are still uncomfortable

with the view that bullying buying practices had con-

tributed to the UK’s vulnerability to

Horsegate. “I don’t accept that was

the case then, or now. This is delib-

erate food fraud. This happened to

be on meat but we’re constantly try-

ing to battle food fraud.”

An ongoing battle that has seen

the establishment of a new EU-wide

food fraud unit, a National Food

Crime Unit here in the UK (albeit

subject to ongoing criticism over

its role and resources), a renewed

focus on the provenance of prod-

ucts and transparency of supply

chains across the entire sector,

and more targeted testing regimes

from the household names that suf-

fered so severely at the hands of

Horsegate.

But is it enough? Is the UK now

protected from a repeat of the

scandal?

“Illegal slaughtering and subse-

quent sales of dodgy meat is almost

impossible to stamp out completely

and if it isn’t seen as a threat to pub-

lic health it might even be given

the blind eye,” says Bagley. “Local

authorities are not kitted out now-

adays to carry out multiple inspec-

tions on farms, so it’s likely it will

be going on somewhere. You don’t

have to be the brain of Britain to

work out that food fraud is attractive

“It involved

nearly four

million people

and was

worth £100bn

plus. Can

you imagine

the vested

interests that

sit behind

all of this?”

Three men were sentenced

in September 2017 for

fraudulently adding

horsemeat to beef

products: Andronicos

Sideras (right), Ulrik

Nielsen (centre) and Alex

Beech (left)