FSAI ‘vigilant’ on labelling after British meat report

JUST one incident of meat mislabelling has been discovered in Ireland over the last six months, and authorities do not feel the issue represents a major concern for the public.

However, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) said it remained “vigilant” for other instances of meat mislabelling and confirmed that testing of meat samples was continuing on an ongoing basis.

The FSAI’s comments follow a recent admission by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in Britain that mislabelling was confirmed in 20pc of meat samples tested in 2017.

The British authorities stated that 145 of the 665 results collected from local authorities contained DNA from animals not on the product label.

Although mislabelling applied to all meats, lamb was the most likely to be replaced with another meat.

However, there were instances of pork labelled as beef and lamb, beef sold as pork or lamb, and even turkey sold as ham.

The FSAI said it was “precluded by law” from disclosing detailed information about the Irish mislabelling incident but it stressed there was no public health risk.

“To date in 2018, there was one non-compliant [test] where non-declared species were found in a meat product. There was no risk to public health identified.

“Follow-up action was taken locally by the Health Service Executive under the terms of the service contract with the FSAI,” a spokesperson stated.

“The FSAI works with its official agencies that enforce food law to ensure checks are carried out to identify possible instances of mislabelling.

“This includes official sampling and testing of meat and meat products as part of our annual national official food sampling programme.”