ABP Food: ‘We’ve found source of burger horsemeat’
2013 kicked off with a bang when horsemeat was found in beef burgers stocked in stores in the UK and Ireland this January, by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.
So it will come as little surprise that the top story of the year so far was ABP Food Group’s claim that it had found the source of the horsemeat in the burgers produced at its Silvercrest Foods site in Ireland.
ABP stopped production at the plant in County Monaghan and Silvercrest said the contaminated product had come from one of its third-party EU suppliers.
A statement released on the company’s website on January 17, said: “Following receipt of this evening’s Irish Department of Agriculture results, we believe that we have established the source of the contaminated material to one of these [Silvercrest, Liffey Meats and Dalepak Hambleton] suppliers.”
The statement did not name the supplier of the contaminated meat. The firm added it would introduce a new testing regime for all meat products, including DNA testing.
ABP also claimed that there was “no food safety issue” as a result of the contamination.
The Society of Chief Officers of Environmental Health in Scotland said there was “no way of telling whether the meat is safe to eat”.