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2013-02-15 23:14:38
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