News special


Horse meat scandal the result of “endemic fraud”


Lord Haskins, a farmer and the former chairman of Northern Foods, has suggested that the recent horsemeat scandal is the result of "endemic fraud" in the food industry which could pose a threat to the catering trade. The ongoing scandal has seen a number of countries including France, Ireland and Romania come under scrutiny for their food processing standards and the mislabelling of meat products, which have lead to supermarkets stocking products containing 60- 100% horsemeat.


Lord Haskins said: “You can’t get away from the odd cheat or the odd


failure, but this is so widespread, it’s endemic, it’s institutional fraud right across the piece. Thousands of people must be aware of what’s going on. When you are dealing with something like minced meat, which has been a perilous product for ever, you really, if you are buying it, need to see the whole lump of meat before it’s processed to be sure of where it comes from.


“All the respectable retailers in this country will do this but [it is] the people on the margins – the shadowy guys – particularly in the non-supermarket trade. The area


that worries me is the catering trade, the hospitals, the schools where the rules are pretty lax.”


“The area that worries me is the catering trade, the hospitals, the schools where the rules are pretty lax.”


— Lord Haskins, former chairman of northern foods


The environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, has admitted that the British food industry relies heavily on trust rather than random testing at each stage of production.


Comment: Traceability in the food industry


Sue Clarke - Senior Information Management Analyst, at analysis company, Ovum


Traceability in the food industry


has been in force in Europe since 2005, and this has resulted in much quicker, simpler and cheaper product recalls, as well as allowing the source of contamination to be traced quickly. Ensuring traceability requires organizations to have effective systems in place to ensure that they can trace components back to previous stages in the manufacturing process, as well as forwards to the next manufacturers in the supply chain, in order to make sure that they are quickly able to identify any components that are affected by a problem and subsequent recall.


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The use of traceability systems has allowed the affected organizations and regulators to trace the likely source of the contaminated meat. However, the damage to the companies affected has already been done, the meat industry has been discredited and the suppliers of the meals have suffered brand damage, and will inevitably suffer from loss of sales.


Without the necessary systems in place the situation would have been much worse. Much of the information relating to the manufacturing process itself will be contained within an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, but supporting documentation may be stored in an enterprise content management (ECM) repository. The benefit of a traceability and product recall solution based on an ECM system is that all of the documentation received from other


organizations in the supply chain can be stored in the repository, including the images of paper documents which have been scanned and had relevant information extracted. Much of this scanning and extraction process can be automated using a traceability and product recall solution from an ECM vendor.


It is being claimed that there has been criminal involvement in the horsemeat contamination scandal, but the ability to trace food components back to their origins through the use of software systems means that criminals should be apprehended much quicker.


www.ovum.com


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