2 Sisters Food Group is being accused of breaches in food safety protocols at a second poultry plant.
Having already suspended operations at its plant in West Bromwich, U.K., over food safety concerns, the company is now being called out for alleged breaches at its Coupar Angus facility in Scotland.
According to a report from ITV, an inspection of the Coupar Angus plant for supermarket chain Tesco revealed that Tesco’s audit team gave a “red” warning to the 2 Sisters plant after uncovering “major” issues of non-compliance.
Among the alleged breaches are:
- 2 Sisters staff could not show what had happened to 250 crates of chicken that had been returned by a customer and earmarked for disposal
- Inspectors found crates of meat with double labels, some with old labels and others with no labels at all.
- A computer on the factory floor wasn’t password protected, theoretically allowing anyone there to change the use-by dates on meat.
2 Sisters responds to allegations
2 Sisters Food Group, on its website, stated that it did not believe there were any breaches at Coupar Angus.
“We view these allegations extremely seriously,” the company stated. “However, ITV and The Guardian are referring to standard inspection audits and appear to be trying to damage the reputation of our factories and potentially the livelihoods of 23,000 colleagues by misrepresenting them. There is and never was any risk to food safety at Coupar Angus. This is using old news to highlight issues which were resolved with our customer two months ago.
After the allegations were made about the West Bromwich plant, 2 Sisters Food Group launched an internal investigation on the situation and the U.K. Food Standards Agency (FSA) also conducted an investigation. 2 Sisters Food Group, at the time, stated that the probe revealed some “isolated instances of non-compliance with our own quality management systems, but the FSA did not identify any breaches.
2 Sisters Food Group, one of Britain's largest food producers and one of the 10 largest privately held companies in the U.K., supplies about one-third of all poultry products consumed in the U.K.
