Chicken King grilled by MPs over ‘food safety failings’
THE under-fire boss of a chicken packing plant, where raw chicken was picked up off the floor and reused, claimed his factories had ‘high standards’ yesterday.
‘Chicken King’ Ranjit Singh Bupara, the chief executive of 2 Sisters Food Group, appeared before MPs to answer claims of food safety failings at one of his plants.
Undercover journalists revealed practices including chicken dropped on the floor being picked up and reused and date labels being swapped on boxes of chicken at a huge factory in Smethwick, West Midlands.
One MP, the Labour veteran Paul Flynn, asked why his company had ‘low standards’. Mr Singh Bupara denied it.
The boss – whose firm is the biggest supplier of chicken to UK supermarkets – told MPs: ‘I don’t understand [that] we have low standards. We do not have low standards. We’ve high standards with our farmers, high standards with our suppliers and high standards with our staff.’
Mr Singh Bupara told the panel that he and colleagues carried out an independent investigation into the allegations and offered 3,000 hours of CCTV footage to the Food Standards Agency.
Mr Singh Bupara said an accusation that labels were switched on boxes of chicken to make it look as if they were a day fresher was ‘very misleading’.
Earlier MPs lambasted food safety bosses involved in food standards at Britain’s chicken factories.
Sandy Martin, Conservative MP for Ipswich, a member of the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, warned them the public will lose faith in the ‘Red Tractor’ scheme which indicates the chicken is of a high standard.
Mr Martin said: ‘The consumer will not be able to rely on the quality of the product, and the quality of the regime, and supermarkets will not bother with the Red Tractor scheme, and it will not be worth the ink its printed on. People will stop employing you to do these things.’
The Food Standards Agency said at the time it had found no evidence of breaches during an inspection of the plant but it was still reviewing evidence.