Food company 'sold tainted meat to schools'
Pastor Dale Morgan
Food company 'sold tainted meat to schools, hotels'*
By Gary Cleland and Harry Wallop
Last Updated: 2:11am GMT 28/11/2007
UK - A food company supplied contaminated meat to Government
departments, prestigious schools and top hotels, according to a former
employee.
McLaren Foods, based in Ashford, Kent, supplied meat to the Treasury,
Westminster School and The Dorchester and Claridges hotels.
The company, which has since gone into administration, also supplied
hospitals including London Chest Hospital, Ipswich and Royal Marsden and
care homes.
But former driver Alan Castle told Radio 4’s Today programme that he
frequently had rotten meat in the back of his van.
He said he was instructed to leave meat on the doorstep of premises if
there was no-one there to take it, leaving it open to vermin or
contamination.
And he claimed if a delivery was not made, meat was routinely left in
unrefrigerated vans for up to 24 hours before it was taken back to the
customer the following day.
He said: “In the back of the van it was quite often rotten meat, even
after you had turned the fridge up.
“Every time you opened the door it would hit you straight away.”
He claimed that the vans were not disinfected every day and “some not on
a weekly basis”.
“Sometimes if deliveries weren’t done it would be taken home and that
delivery would be taken the next day, even though it had been sat in the
back of the van in the driver’s driveway,” he said.
Other former employees of the food company told how blood would seep
through packaging and contaminate other meat before delivery.
On one occasion Claridges sent back an order of 250 sirloin steaks
because they were green, while Kensington Preparatory School complained
after its meat order was simply thrown over a wall.
Professor Paul Hunter of the University of East Anglia, who works as an
advisor to the Food Standards Agency, said: “The fact that raw meat and
cooked meat are delivered together in a way that the raw meat can
contaminate the cooked meat and then has been left around unrefrigerated
is a recipe for food poisoning.
“It is entirely possible that if you did get an outbreak of food
poisoning in that situation in a care home or hospital there would be
one or more deaths.”
Mr Castle felt so strongly about the potential risk to health over the
company that he raised the matter with his superiors a year ago and even
contacted Chelmsford’s environmental health department.
The department carried out an inspection of the company’s Chelmsford
depot but gave McLaren warning of when it would take place.
A spokesman for Chelmsford Borough Council said it had to give McLaren’s
directors notice of its inspection in order to give them time to travel
to meet the inspectors because were not based a the Chelmsford depot.
Paul Brookes, the council’s environmental services manager, said: “When
carrying out a pre-arranged inspection there is always a possibility
that conditions on site could be made to look artificially better than
reality. For this reason, we requested further detailed documentation on
the company’s policies and procedures.
"Unfortunately, as the letter went out, the company went into
receivership. Had we received the documentation requested, I am
confident that had there been any breaches in food safety legislation,
we would have then discovered evidence of it, and the appropriate action
would have been taken.”
Despite the company going into administration, there is no reason in law
why its managing director, Micah Hobson, could not start another meat
distribution company, despite the allegations made against McLaren.
There was no answer at the company’s former Ashford headquarters.
Mr Hobson and operations director Michael Prior have both previously
refused to be interviewed about the allegations.
Prof Hunter said that he suspected that McLaren Foods was far from the
only distribution company using that could be accused of bad practice.
He said that McLaren “is probably at the worse end of the spectrum but I
would be very surprised if it was the only example around the country”.