Supermarkets to give their own chicken bug figures

The food standards watchdog is to stop naming individual supermarkets and the proportion of chickens they sell that are contaminated with the food poisoning bug campylobacter.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has regularly reported the percentage of chickens sold with campylobacter by the nine biggest supermarkets – Aldi, Asda, Co-op, Lidl, Marks and Spencer, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose – since 2014.

Rates of campylobacter contamination have continued to fall during that time, with the most recent figures in June showing 6.5% of chickens tested positive at the highest level, down from 9.3% for the same period last year.

Campylobacter is the leading cause of food poisoning in the UK and makes 280,000 people ill each year.

The FSA said it had reached an agreement with the industry for supermarkets to publish their own figures. Each store will report the proportion of chickens that carry the highest level of contamination, not the higher figure showing overall contamination, and the FSA will publish the figures as a national average.

The FSA said: “Following discussions with the industry on an FSA initiative, the top nine retailers have agreed to publish their own campylobacter results on their consumer websites.

“The sampling and analyses carried out by the retailers will be in accordance with robust protocols established by the FSA that will also ensure that their published results are comparable.

“In addition, the FSA will have access to the raw data from each retailer in order to verify the samples.”