More horse

Horsemeat is believed to have been used in 4.5 million ready meals in 13 European countries. As a consequence of this substitution scandal, international food manufacturers like Findus, Birds Eye United Kingdom, Nestlé and even Ikea have had to withdraw their meat products from the market.

The safety of their ready meals was not questioned - they were, and are, safe but consumers were not amused at being sold horse for beef. And now there will be ongoing costs for brand owners as they rebuild consumer trust in their ready meals.

In most cases the brand owners are victims - the ingredients and the provenance of the ingredients they specified was simply not what was delivered.

According to the French agriculture ministry, there was “serious, precise and corroborating evidence of a consumer fraud at a European level”.

It now seems likely that in the last six-odd months, the French meat processor Spanghero re-labelled 750 tonnes of Romanian horsemeat as being beef meat, for an estimated profit of €550,000.

The whole fiasco has brought into light two particular areas - traceability and supply chain complexity.

In the first instance, traceability, the results are pretty good. The products were traced back pretty well. The problem was that the products were not what they were supposed to be.

On the other hand, the complexity of the European (and undoubtedly most other) supply chain was amazing. 

In the current horsemeat substitution scandal there were four intermediaries between the French supermarket shelf and the Romanian abattoir: the food brand (Findus), the food manufacturer (Comigel), the meat processor (Spanghero) and the trader (a Cypriot and Dutch trader).

The longer the chain, the higher is the risk of integrity breakdown as each step on the chain wants to make a profit on the trade. The actual money available for the ingredient becomes lower and lower the longer the supply chain. This is especially true for ready meals, which are frequently aimed at the ‘economy’ market. When retailers in the UK are selling ready meals for AU$1.50 per serve there is huge impetus to purchase the meat as cheaply as possible.

In many ways the low cost of the ready meal to the consumer fuels the potential for (but does not excuse) opportunistic behaviour along the supply chain. Australia and New Zealand are not immune from the same pressures and behaviour. The self-regulated auditing model inherent in FSANZ Standard 3.2.1 is great for food safety but does not offer protection against corruption and fraud.

Now to mitigate the risks, everyone is testing their products for horse and horse-like (donkey, ass etc) contamination. However, this basically means no one is going to try passing off horse as beef anymore as they know the substitution will be detected. So processors and brand-owners are going to have to test for whatever the next substitution fraud will be. They only need to guess what to test for!