Farmer to sue egg supplier for £1m over salmonella outbreak
Supermarket producer accused of spreading disease that poisoned 100 via contaminated trays
‘The response to this by industry and government officials was absolutely woeful. This destroyed our poultry business’
ONE of the country’s biggest producers of supermarket eggs faces a £1 million legal claim over allegations that it helped spread a salmonella outbreak which poisoned more than 100 people.
Kent-based Fridays is accused by one of its former suppliers in a High Court claim of spreading the outbreak across the country by contaminated egg-trays. It denies the claims and says food safety has always been its “highest priority”.
Egg farmer Douglas Wanstall, 50, who once operated 14 farms with more than 250,000 laying hens, claims there was a series of failures by both Fridays and regulators over the outbreak, which infected two of his farms and was kept from the public for more than two years. He said: “The response of the industry and government officials to this outbreak was absolutely woeful.”
Between July 2017 and December 2020, 118 people were poisoned by a strain of salmonella linked to egg-laying farms across the country. It is claimed in that the Fridays egg-packing plant in Cranbrook, Kent, which packs 10 million eggs a week, was the common link in many or all of the outbreaks.
Fridays, which has revenues of about £50million a year, says it has supplied eggs to all the major multiple retailers. Industry sources say these have included Tesco, Asda and Morrisons.
In July 2017, one of Mr Wanstall’s farms, Harefield in Northamptonshire, was suspended from supplying UK eggs for seven months after salmonella was found. In 2018, it is claimed two other farms supplying Fridays were contaminated with the same salmonella strain. Another of his farms, Deer Farm at Farrington in north Dorset, was found to be infected with the strain in March 2019. About 40,000 birds were slaughtered.
Government regulator the Animal and Plant Health Agency then tested for salmonella at Fridays, nearly two years after the first outbreak. According to the court documents, the APHA allegedly found “widespread” salmonella. It has refused to release details of the inspection, citing commercial confidentiality.
Wanstall, who has a farm near Ashford, Kent, said the outbreak forced him out of large-scale egg production. His farming firm J Wanstall & Sons is seeking damages from Fridays of between £500,000 and £1million. He said: “This destroyed our poultry business. We now have just one flock of 12,000.”
He alleges that regulators and the British Egg Industry Council, which oversees the British Lion Code of Practice for UK eggs, did not take the risk of salmonella being spread by contaminated trays seriously enough. But the council said there was no evidence the salmonella strain originated from the packing plant.“BEIC at all times acted appropriately to safeguard public health, including by preventing the onward supply of eggs into the UK food chain,” it said.
The Food Standards Agency said it was first informed about the outbreak on Nov 21 2017 and told “a significant number of supermarkets were affected”. It said no alert was issued because the eggs were no longer on the market. It issued “precautionary” egg safety advice on Sept 21 2019 – the day after an outbreak was reported in the media – because it says it was informed of an outbreak involving eggs in the supply chain.
Fridays denied the allegations. It said: “We have adopted and complied with all applicable standards, including the national control plan for salmonella, the Lion scheme and other voluntary codes of best practice to ensure the protection of our supply chain.”