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Feb 16th 2013 |From the print edition
Do I look like a cow?
TITUS ANDRONICUS avenged himself on the barbarian queen Tamora by murdering her
sons and serving them up to her in a pie. European food manufacturers did
nothing so dreadful when they sold horse as beef in burgers and lasagne.
Horsemeat is not dangerous. Italian gourmets adore thin slices of prosciutto di
cavallo. The Chinese chomp half a million tonnes of horseflesh a year. But if a
product says beef on the label, it should be that.
Some big names are now deeply embarrassed. Tesco, a British supermarket, Aldi,
a German discounter, and Findus, a frozen-food manufacturer, all inadvertently
sold the fraudulent flesh. It may have reached more than a dozen countries.
Sellers withdrew the offending products and grovelled. Politicians fulminated.
More test results are expected soon. (Update: On February 14th Britain's Food
Standards Agency said that eight horses slaughtered in the country tested
positive for the painkiller bute and six of them may have entered the food
chain in France.)
That horses have strayed into the food chain does not show that the fencing has
collapsed. Food is vastly safer than it was a century ago, when food poisoning
was a statistically significant cause of death (see chart). Rules tighten with
each scare. After a deadly outbreak of a human version of mad-cow disease,
caught from eating British beef in the 1990s, farmers had to give cows
passports showing where they came from and where they had been. (Horses have
passports, too, though the scheme is somewhat laxer.)
Big retailers and producers have brands to protect, so they are vigilant. When
fraudsters are found to have diluted a pricey fruit juice with a cheaper one,
or switched Basmati for ordinary rice, it is sometimes because a supermarket
has spotted something wrong. An audit by Tesco of its suppliers is one of the
most feared and respected things in the industry, says Michael Walker, a
food-safety consultant. How come it didn t pick this up?
Tesco s answer is that in one case its supplier of frozen burgers disregarded a
list of approved suppliers and its stipulation that the meat come from Britain
or Ireland. But such mishaps have deeper causes.
Though prices of raw materials are going up, penny-pinching consumers refuse to
pay more for ready-meals. Retailers, equally unwilling to forgo profits, are
putting relentless pressure on suppliers to cut costs. They in turn are
frantically rejigging foodstuffs to be cheaper. De-sinewed meat (scraps
mechanically separated from the carcass) seemed a fitting ingredient for
low-priced British hamburgers until last April. But then the European
Commission banned most types of it. Patty makers may have looked abroad for an
alternative.
The mislabelled-mince saga reveals just how convoluted the supply chain can
be, says Bryan Roberts of Kantar Retail, a consultancy. The ground-up horse
that found its way into the own-label lasagne of Findus and Aldi was apparently
slaughtered in Romania. Two intermediaries arranged its shipment to a French
processor, Spanghero, which sent it to a factory in Luxembourg owned by
Comigel, also French. The more complex the food chain, the more difficult it
is to control, says Mark Woolfe, a former head of food authenticity at Britain
s Food Standards Agency.
This bedevils every industry with stretched-out supply lines. Walmart, an
American retailing giant, had no idea that garment suppliers had subcontracted
orders to a sweatshop in Bangladesh until it burned down, with consequences
more awful than the queasiness felt by unwitting consumers of horsemeat. A
recent survey by PwC, a consultancy, found that retail and consumer-goods
companies were less likely than other industries to see their supply chains as
having strategic importance, treating them instead as ways to save money. The
footloose relationships that food companies often have with suppliers can
spring nasty surprises.
Even before the horsemeat hoo-ha, there were rumbles of change. A report by
Rabobank, a Dutch bank, urges food companies to move away from fleeting
relationships with independent-minded suppliers and towards dedicated supply
chains based on long contracts and close collaboration. Walmart s IPL and Tesco
s Group Food Sourcing, which bypass middlemen and buy directly from producers,
may be steps in that direction.
Horses for courses
Retailers say auditors cannot be expected to catch the sort of fraud that may
have let horsemeat into the burger chain. The emphasis may well shift towards
testing, both by agencies and by the industry. Food is already checked for
pesticides, microbes, heavy metals and drugs. One reason horseburgers were not
caught earlier is that a panic about horsemeat in salami in 2003 turned out to
be an expensive false alarm. Now testers will no doubt screen for the entire
manifest of Noah s ark.
Mr Roberts hopes that retailers will ease up in their unyielding quest for
lower costs. However, that would require shoppers, too, to care less about
prices. Good luck with that.
From the print edition: Business