Food manufacturers and retailers have come under fire from the Conservative Party, which has recently launched its 'Honest Food' campaign, calling for a crackdown on the "dishonest" labelling of meat-based products such as pies, sausages and ready meals.
The party is aiming to introduce a Parliamentary Bill, which requires manufacturers and retailers to display compulsory origin labelling of all meat ingredients that represent 10% or more of products. The Tories argued current legislation was not sufficient because meat imported from overseas and processed into products in the UK can be labelled as 'British', which it said was misleading and dishonest.
The Tories have slammed Birds Eye's Roast Chicken Dinner product as part of its 'Great British Menu' because it contains imported meat. Other products which have been singled out include Blue Star's Cumberland Sausages, which are made with meat from Belgium; Marks & Spencer's sandwiches, which bear the Union Jack flag on the front of the pack despite containing beef imported from Brazil; and Tesco's bacon chop, which claims that the product is 'produced in Britain', despite the fact that the pork has been sourced from outside the EU, according to the Tories.
The campaign has met with resistance from the manufacturing sector. The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) warned that creating different labels to reflect the changing origin of the ingredients used to cook complex products would be a nightmare for food manufacturers, and would "add further, unnecessary costs to our sector at a difficult time".
"The Conservatives have rightly picked up on consumer concerns about the origin of the fresh meat they are buying in supermarkets," Helen Munday, director of food safety and science at the FDF admitted. "But that is a completely different issue to the labelling of generic products such as pies which are cooked using a number of ingredients, sourced from a range of suppliers. In this instance, most consumers don't expect country of origin labelling, unless its absence would mislead them."