Revealed: the dirty secret of the UK’s poultry industry

• Two-thirds of fresh retail chicken in UK contaminated with campylobacter
• Guardian findings prompt investigations at three major supermarkets
• Government shelves plans to name and shame suppliers

Food poisoning scandal: how chicken spreads campylobacter

Sick chicken: what you need to know and what the government won't tell you – video

Three of the UK’s leading supermarkets have launched emergency investigations into their chicken supplies after a Guardian investigation uncovered a catalogue of alleged hygiene failings in the poultry industry.

Undercover footage, photographic evidence and information from whistleblowers has revealed how strict industry hygiene standards to prevent the contamination of chicken with the potentially deadly campylobacter bug can be flouted on the factory floor and on farms.

Specific incidents identified in the last month include a factory floor flooded with chickens guts in which the bacteria can flourish, carcasses coming into contact with workers’ boots then returned to the production line and other poor practices involving points in the production chain that increase the risk of its spread.
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The evidence prompted Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer to launch emergency investigations into their chicken sources over the last week.

The concern centres on the bacteria campylobacter, which at the last count was present in two-thirds of British fresh chicken sold in the UK. Although the bug is killed by thorough cooking, around 280,000 people in the UK are currently made ill each year by it and 100 people are thought to die. Contamination rates are known to have increased in the past decade.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA), however, decided on Wednesday to shelve a promise to name and shame supermarkets and processors for their campylobacter rates. The climbdown comes after “push-back” from industry and interventions from government departments.

One source said they had been told Number 10 had raised concerns about the communication of the results, fearing that they could provoke a food scare similar to that triggered when the former Conservative minister Edwina Currie warned that most of British eggs were contaminated with salmonella in 1988.

The Guardian’s five-month investigation uncovered a series of alleged hygiene failings in the chicken industry.

The allegations have been made against two of the largest UK poultry processors, 2 Sisters Food Group and Faccenda. They relate to two factories owned by 2 Sisters that supply fresh chicken and chicken for ready meals to Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Aldi, M&S, KFC and to farms and an abattoir owned by Faccenda, which supplies Asda and Nando’s.



The allegations are that:

• Chickens which fall on to the floor have repeatedly been put back on to the production line at two 2 Sisters sites. They company denies this ever happens and says all chicken from the floor is correctly disposed of as waste.

• Breakdowns led to high-risk material – feathers, guts and offal – piling up for hours on separate occasions while production continued at a 2 Sisters factory in Wales. The company says they did not stop the line because they had to consider the welfare of chickens waiting in crates to be killed.

• Another breakdown led to the water in scald tanks at the same site not being cleaned for three days, so that around 250,000 birds passed through dirty water after slaughter. The company says this was an isolated incident that lasted only one day, bacteria counts were checked and were acceptable.

• According to a whistleblower chicken catcher, biosecurity rules to stop the spread of campylobacter in chicken sheds at Faccenda were regularly ignored by workers when he was employed there. Faccenda says this is not true and it has invested heavily in a highly trained and motivated workforce.

Campylobacter contamination has plagued the poultry industry for more than a decade and has got worse in that time.

The FSA ordered new tests for campylobacter amid worries that there had been no improvements in rates. Results were due in June, and as recently as March the FSA’s chief executive, Catherine Brown, publicly vowed to press ahead with “steely determination” despite push-back from industry.

On Wednesday, however, Brown asked the FSA board to reverse the previous decision to publish campylobacter results for named supermarkets and processors every quarter. The board heard that there were now concerns, not raised previously, that the sample size for one quarter’s data was insufficiently large to be statistically robust.

Brown insisted that the threat of exposing campylobacter results had made supermarkets and chicken processors take notice of the FSA’s concerns about contamination for the first time, but said the industry had not so far made the changes in production needed to reduce campylobacter on any scale.

“Time is upon us for everyone to work out how they are going to stump up money to make the interventions on [the production] line,” she told the meeting.

The eight members of the board were divided on the proposals, leaving the chairman and former president of the National Farmers’ Union, Tim Bennett, to use his casting vote to quash the plans to name companies for the moment. They are looking at separate proposals to urgently increase the testing of retail chicken.

Steve Wearne, director of policy at the FSA, said ahead of the board meeting: “Other government departments have reflected to us concerns which are the same as those we’ve heard directly from retailers and producers. We’re not letting the industry off the hook. We’ll publish all the names when we’ve completed [the survey] next summer.

“If we publish the results piecemeal, other people might draw unwarranted conclusions from partial data and we don’t want consumers being misled or confused.”

Erik Millstone, a food safety professor at Sussex University, condemned the board’s decision. “In the last few years the Food Standards Agency has been under a great deal of pressure from the government and the food industry to ensure that it only provides reassuring messages, and especially that it should say nothing that could provoke any ‘food scares’,” he said. “But the FSA was created to protect consumers, not to protect the food industry, or to give ministers a quiet time. This decision shows that its independence is entirely illusory.”

The executive director of Which? magazine, Richard Lloyd, said: "The Guardian's investigation raises serious concerns. Tackling campylobacter has to become a much bigger priority for supermarkets and their suppliers as it is responsible for thousands of cases of food poisoning and the deaths of 100 people every year. It's therefore disappointing that the FSA has gone back on its commitment to publish in full the quarterly data on the levels of campylobacter in supermarket chickens, when it is clearly in the public interest to do so. The FSA must put consumers first and operate more transparently than this."

The campylobacter story

Campylobacter is the most common form of food poisoning in the UK. Photograph: Alamy

Although the public are mostly unaware of it, the scale of campylobacter contamination and the number of people it makes ill each year have been well-known among industry bosses, retail directors and government officials for more than a decade. The annual cost to the economy is a staggering £900m, making a significant dent in the £3.3bn the poultry industry claims to contribute to Britain’s GDP. Up to 80% of campylobacter infections are attributable to contaminated poultry.

The points in the chicken production chain at which contamination occurs are clearly understood, but during the past decade the picture has got worse. In 2003 the FSA reported that 56% of chicken on sale was infected. By 2008 that had increased to 65%.

The decision over whether to name and shame the industry is a vexed one. The stakes are high – consumers are likely to shun poultry in supermarkets with the worst scores. Cleaning up would require money, experts say, and poultry firms and retailers are locked in to an economic structure of their own making in their race to produce the cheapest possible chicken.
In the factory

The Guardian has investigated the weak links in the chicken chain, gathering material from undercover film, photographic evidence and whistleblowers.

Just last month – on a not untypical day, according to sources – at a vast chicken abattoir in Anglesey owned by the UK’s largest poultry company, 2 Sisters Food Group, something of the nature of the problem is revealed. Tesco, M&S and Asda are among the customers for chicken for ready meals supplied from this site.

The pump system has broken down again, and the channel that is supposed to drain away the innards from the tens of thousands of chickens killed and processed each day for supermarket orders has been blocked for a prolonged period. Guts and offal extracted during a process called evisceration are piling up to form a gory heap of high-risk material. The floor around is wet with blood. Campylobacter is carried in the guts and faeces of chickens and evisceration is one of the key points in the processing chain at which contamination occurs.

“That’s unbelievable, it just shouldn’t be allowed to happen,” said Ron Spellman, the director general of EWFC, which represents meat inspectors across the EU, when we showed him pictures the Guardian had obtained of the incident that had been described to us. Spellman was a poultry inspector for 12 years.

“They should stop the line and clean up. But that costs money, and the process is generally run so hard and fast, if a line is down too long they don’t have enough hours in the day to fulfil their supermarket orders. And if they don’t meet orders, they lose the contract.”

More, plus video at:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/23/-sp-revealed-dirty-secret-uk-poultry-industry-chicken-campylobacter

It ain't pretty.

this is what happens when people expect to get food for ridiculously low prices....

victorisnotamused wrote:this is what happens when people expect to get food for ridiculously low prices....

Lots of people don't have much money to spend on food Victor, and they don't have the resources to get their own, but it's also what happens when companies don't abide by standards and want to make a lot of money out of selling the food and still undercut others.

actually the ones to blame are the supermarkets and their bloody contracts....they nearly crippled farming in the uk untill the farmers got wise and told em to bugger off.....

and food is for next to nothing, what takes money out of peoples pockets at an inordinate rate is "living costs" like rent/mortgages, power, fuel/transport all of which are extortionate.

and then again there are those who cant live with a 12 month old smart phone "cos it aint the latest thing"

nope...food is for next to nothing in comparison to a few years ago

Well, I know how much my shopping bill has gone up, and I'm a frugal shopper, although I do buy the meat we have from an organic butcher, it's the one luxury I allow us, and looking at that article I'm glad I do!

try this

how long did your father have to work when he was say 30, to earn a loaf of bread or a chicken for sunday dinner

how long does an average working man of 30 have to work today to get the same???

when I was a kid, a chicken was an ocaisional sunday lunch
now i can eat it every day (not that i'd want to) and its a cheap meal....

ham was a special treat....


and so on......

Actually, bread is not a good compairson.   When I first started feeding a family, buying a loaf of bread was about one shilling, about 5p.   I was earning £25 a week.   Now, a decent loaf of bread is about £1, I'm not talking about the wrapped sliced dough stuff.

Yes a chicken was a treat, agree there, but my Nan was only a char lady, used to get sliced ham from the butcher quite a lot. And think of the stuff that was normal and cheap then, but totally OTT now. Lamb costs a fortune, and they cut the meat different. Nan used to get all kinds of cuts of different meants for slow cooking that were cheap that are not around anymore. Hand and Spring of Pork comes to mind, and have you seen the price of belly pork, which they used to nearly give away!

I know it's all relative and I do get your point, but the people who really have little money don't have a choice but to eat rubbish.

victorisnotamused wrote:actually the ones to blame are the supermarkets and their bloody contracts....they nearly crippled farming in the uk untill the farmers got wise and told em to bugger off.....

and food is for next to nothing, what takes money out of peoples pockets at an inordinate rate is "living costs" like rent/mortgages, power, fuel/transport all of which are extortionate.

and then again there are those who cant live with a 12 month old smart phone "cos it aint the latest thing"

nope...food is for next to nothing in comparison to a few years ago

that is true
looking at the numbers things like rent/mortgage now make a greater % of weekly spending than ever before
power/fuel cost are liable to keep going up as resources become scarcer until enough renewable energy stations can be built.

   FOOD only takes around half the household budget - percentage-wise - that it cost back in the 1970's and '60's...
(Food prices actually bottomed out around 5-6 years ago, and have risen by 30% again over the last few years (and are likely to keep on rising due to non-production pressures over the next few years (e.g. transport, politics, industrial pollution costs) ~ though looming water shortages will surpass that in the next decade..) ~ so giving that sense of steep short-term rises; whilst many are still ignoring the decades-long price drops).

Anybody who thinks that their last grocery bill was still a tad high should check out what "treats" and incidentals may have sneaked in there ~ e.g. snackfoods, confectionery and soft drinks, cakes and biscuits, wine, spirits and pre-mixeed drinks, extra and unnecessary "cleaning" products..


SUPERMARKET pressures on growers and producers isn't an exclusively British and Euro' problem, either ~ as they have practically crippled the dairy industry, and vast sections of the market garden and poultry industries as well, over here.


FINALLY, I would 'take with a grain of salt' any labeling claims as to "organic, pesticide and/or hormone free, no animals suffered, free-range" ~ as often descriptions and guidelines are vague or poorly worded, regulations too lax, and government dept.'s responsible for ::resmahauth:: the rules are frequently undermanned and slow to act.  
Such things as "free range" and "organic" claims are still undergoing revision, while rogue producers ignoring or circumventing hormone and antibiotic rules keep on popping up..

I shy away from any food labeled  "organic."  Organic means...Tastes like shite and twice as expensive.  Most of what is labeled organic is grown by inefficient growers, who can't afford the economies of scale necessary to support better and more nutritious growing methods.

That is why their produce is smaller, less nutritious and generally more unkempt than that found in the ordinary shelf.  Ironically, people point to the whimp "natural" produce with pride, because they subscribe to the value of "naturalism," not because nature is better (it isn't).  It's the modern version of "snake oil."

If "natural" were better, then the first guy who found that a sharpened stick could better kill prey, would be shunned as having an inferior product.  It is, after all, unnatural.  The real problem is with the various chemicals and antibiotics that are injected or ingested into meats and vegetables.  The average guy hasn't the expertise to know what's going on.  Just like the sharpened stick, each of those have to be judged on their own merits (that's why we have the Food and Drug Administration).

There is a whole field of study on the folly of things labeled "natural."  It's called ethical naturalism.