Supply Chain Scandals

While several years have since passed, who could forget the breaking news of 2013 that Tesco’s beef products were up to 100% horsemeat? The story broke in January of that year, after the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) randomly tested the supermarket chain’s frozen beef burgers and other frozen meals in November of 2012. The DNA tests revealed that over one third of the burgers contained horse meat, while 85% of the products tested contained pork; but more alarmingly, these tests pointed to a massive breakdown in the traceability of the food manufacturing supply chain. Investigations in the ensuing months would shed light on an industry plagued by criminal activity and opaque distribution practices.

The Scandal

The initial testing identified three factories that were producing the tainted goods, two of which were subsidiaries of ABP Food Group, one of Europe’s largest beef processors. Following the FSAI tests, The United Kingdom Food Safety Authority requested that the entire industry test its beef products, and the results were anything but reassuring: they revealed that frozen lasagna and spaghetti sold by Tesco and other retailers contained up to 100% horsemeat, in some cases. Comigel, the French manufacturer supplying the ‘beef’ meals, had been distributing their tainted products to 16 different countries.

The reason for this widespread use of horse meat was simple: greed. Food fraud is lucrative, especially following a crop failure, as limited — and therefore more expensive — ingredients can be replaced by cheaper substitutes (like horse meat). The adulteration of meat products is relatively common, with manufacturers using fat, water, and concentrated proteins (often in the form of pork rind) to bulk out their value. As long as the manufacturer correctly labels these concentrates, the practice is perfectly legal; in fact, in the UK, cheap burgers can contain as little as 47% beef.

Criminality

When it came to the horse meat scandal, however, the beef substitution was fraudulent on an industry-wide scale. Retailers were buying food from suppliers at prices significantly lower than the established market price, which was only possible thanks to the availability of horse meat as a cheap alternative (sourced from some 50,000 “disappeared” horses sold on the black market).

Unfortunately, tracing the meat back to its true sources proved incredibly difficult, largely because suppliers refused to take the blame. ABP, for example, blamed its continental suppliers in the Netherlands and Spain, but later suggested that the meat came from Poland. In Ireland, massive blocks of beef containing 80% horse meat were found in Freeza Foods’ facilities, but they insisted that they were merely storing the blocks for meat broker McAdam Foods. Meanwhile, McAdams said the meat was purchased from Flexi Foods, who got the meat from suppliers in Poland, and so on.