Advice to Butchers

The revelations of what has been going into supermarket products and ready meals has made customers turn to the integrity of their craft butcher. Their provenance and local traceability can be demonstrated and that is just the assurance that customers are seeking.

The quality and assurance of Scotch Beef is unique and Scotland's butchers are delighted to meet and serve new customers who recognise that they should be buying their meat from their local craft butcher.

What cannot be allowed to happen is for one or two to spoil the good image that is seeing butchers revered in this way.

This communication for SFMTA members was sent out freely to every address that SFMTA holds for butchers businesses in Scotland. Please read this closely so that there is no danger of your business receiving the wrong kind of publicity.

Carry Over
The need to consider production methods

This is a clear opportunity for butchers to demonstrate complete control over what goes into their meat products. They source the meat and they and their staff make the meat products. But this is not totally without danger.

What we don't need now is any testing that the Food Standards Agency and Local Authorities undertake tarnishing the good image of butchers.

There is a difference between blatant substitution and accidental inclusion. It is unlikely Scottish butchers would blatantly substitute cheaper species meat to be passed off as the real thing. What concerns is the potential for cross species contamination showing up in tests.

Most butchers make batches of sausages one after the other and there is very little cleaning and disinfection between batches. Obviously moving between species will create potential for more than one species being present in the next batch of sausages because of the residual meat in the barrel of the mincer.

The tolerance in testing has been set by the Food Standards Agency at 1% i.e. 100g in a 10 kilo batch. It is set at 1% because this is the degree of accuracy that tests can go to with any robustness.

Lots of butchers make batches of speciality sausages in smaller batches. Therefore if a 5 kilo batch of Pork and Leek Sausages, for example, following on a batch of beef sausages gains 200g of beef sausage then the percentage of beef in the Pork & Leek Sausages could be 4%.

The same potential risk from carry over exists when making beef burgers and the likes of pork and apple burgers one after the other using the same mincer.

Take care what happens with your lamb trim. If it gets mixed in with your beef trim maybe your beef sausages should be labelled contains a small calculated percentage of lamb.

Please take care to avoid this happening and if necessary write something into your HACCP plan to cover this risk. This could be as simple as removing the plate and barrel of your mincer and removing the residual meat of one species before going on to the next.

This way there will be less than 1% carry over but labelling all beef and lamb meat products as may contain traces of pork would be over the top might not be helpful to consumers.

It should be emphasised that the Food Standards Agency acknowledges that there is a difference between trace contamination and deliberate substitution / fraud or carry over contamination in batches of product with meat from mixed species.

Current testing methods will pick up trace levels of DNA lower than 1%, and it's important to get the message across that the FSA's main focus for now is on intentional fraud and gross contamination rather than trace.

This in no way reduces the importance that butchers ensure that they reduce carry over of product between batches as far as possible.

SFMTA Activity

SFMTA has been in regular dialogue with FSA, QMS and Scottish Government. Douglas Scott attended a meeting with the Cabinet Secretary Richard Lochhead on Monday 11/02. A great many media calls have been dealt with; Douglas Scott was on BBC Radio Scotland Newsdrive and STV News, several national newspapers have carried our positive comments and members have been given advice on speaking to local media.

Reasons to separate meat by species

The problem is actually not in horse meat as such. It is quite edible and rather wholesome, according to dieticians. Still, certain eating traditions exist everywhere.

For example, people in the UK generally do not eat horse meat, just as Muslims do not eat pork. The scandal broke out because meat products sold with the marking of beef actually consisted of horse meat and even pork and donkey meat.

Religion compounds the problem and Indian carry outs have cases where beef has been substituted for lamb in curries.

Naturally, defrauded Europeans are demanding an investigation of the fraud and taking the case to court. Everyone has the right to know what is in meat products.

This horsemeat mess is alarming for another reason. If local inspectors allowed horse meat to go to shop counters instead of beef it means that the meat was possibly not checked fit for human consumption. So it is possible that it contains phenylbutazone, a medication for horses which causes blood cancer in humans.

France insists that the crime can be traced to Romania but the export of live horses for meat purposes from Romania to the EU was stopped two years ago due to the outbreak of a disease known as swamp-fever, or horse AIDS. However, deliveries of horse meat to the EU were not banned.

Pork is no longer just Meat
Meat from beef, lamb and pork used to be considered as meat, declaration of species did not become necessary until 2004. Historically pork products may have had traces of beef in them, beef products traces of pork.

An Understanding of DNA

The industry standard ELISA test for meat species has limit of detection typically around 1%. However Real Time PCR for DNA is ten to 100 times more sensitive with a limit of detection in the range 0.01% to 0.1%. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a technology in molecular biology to amplify a single or a few copies of a piece of DNA across several orders of magnitude, generating thousands to millions of copies of a particular DNA sequence.

Why horse DNA had never shown up before
ELISA testing is much cheaper to do than DNA testing. ELISA is usually done as a screen by kit which would look for four meat species i.e. beef, lamb, pork and poultry. No regular testing was done for horse which is why it has not been found before.

Does washing the mincer remove all the DNA?
Proper washing with detergent should remove all the DNA. If a mincer is chemically clean there should be no detectable meat species DNA. The use of bleach (sodium hypochlorite) will destroy any residual DNA and would also make it microbiologically clean.

Meatball Manufacture

A message can clearly be taken from the Waitrose Meat Ball recall, each species in the product should be listed on the label. A meatball recipe is probably best when the meat used if both beef and pork but the presence of pork needs to be declared.

Waitrose announced the discovery of traces of pork after it carried out tests of 40 of its products in the wake of the horse meat controversy. Waitrose spokesman Mark Price said in a website statement: “No horse meat was found in any of these tests. We did, however, discover that, in just two batches of our essential Waitrose frozen British beef meatballs (480g), some of the meatballs may contain some pork.”

Waitrose stressed that one test had shown the meatballs to be 100% beef but decided to issue a statement to customers after a second test showed some pork.

“Although the meatballs are safe to eat, pork is not listed as an ingredient and should not be part of the recipe,” said Mr Price.

Other incidences where products can be improved with the addition of another species is venison sausages and burgers where added pork fat can create a more succulent product but please remember that the pork fat needs to be declared on the ticket.

Beef Labelling

From 1st September 2000 it has been compulsory to put certain information on your beef tickets and labels. Onerous though this may be, use this information to your advantage because you will be able to highlight where your beef comes from – hopefully Scotland.

Environmental Health Officers are always asking for evidence of Beef Labelling and the Federation can help you provide what is necessary in a form that is meaningful to your customers. At the end of the day you should be left with information that you can use to promote your business and the beef you sell. Beef Labelling Boards are available for SFMTA members to purchase.

What is required?
The law requires you to record what beef you have on the premises and sold. This is not as tricky as it sounds. Most butchers will have some method of stock control, logging goods coming in and so that is where you need to start the recording. The same system should also help you establish when that beef has been sold which is another requirement of the law.

Suppliers Information
The info required to be displayed is
Supplier's Name
Slaughtered in (name of member state – has to be UK, not Scotland even if Scotch)
Licence number of the slaughterhouse
Cut in (name of member state)
Licence number of Cutting Plant (s)
“Cut in the UK on these premises” is sufficient if the beef is only cut and sold [in the shop] or [on a single premises].
Name of Member state as Origin.

Voluntary Claims
You must prove the information you give to your customers is clear and not misleading. The following are examples of information which needs to be approved. If you are not sure whether the information you want to use needs to be approved, please contact Bruce at SFMTA (tel: 01738 637472)

Region or local origin – where the animal was born and reared
Name of farm
Breed or cross breed
Age or sex of the animal
Method of production (for example, farm assured, grass-fed)
Method of slaughter (for example, halal, kosher)
Date of slaughter, Method or length of maturation

If you want to label your beef with this or similar information, you must make sure that the information you are providing is common to all animals and meat which the labelled product comes from. SFMTA can perform this verification at no cost but unless you have a robust system of in-house traceability, we will not be able to approve your application.

Help with Product Labelling

Before the Meat Product Regulations changed in 2004 the definition of 'meat' made no distinction between muscle-meat, fat and offal, whereas consumers generally perceive meat to mean muscle-meat. The rules introduced in 2004 contained a set of provisions to improve consumer information in a variety of ways. These apply to meat products sold loose or across the counter sales and in a more detailed way on pre-packaged meat products.

Firstly, the 2004 rules restrict the definition of 'meat' to the skeletal-attached muscles, which amounts to a major change. Other parts of animals for human consumption, such as offal (heart, liver, kidney etc.) or fat, will now have to be declared separately in the list of ingredients and are not considered as 'meat'.

Secondly, the species from which the meat came from must also be indicated in the list of ingredients such as (beef meat, pig meat, etc.). This information is very important for consumers to help them make an informed choice on the basis of their personal preferences.

The general labelling requirements for pre-packaged food, such as providing the list of ingredients and quantitative ingredient declarations (QUID) apply in addition. The QUID declaration for an ingredient is its proportion as a percentage of all the ingoing ingredients as recorded at the mixing bowl stage i.e. its quantity as a percentage of the entire product and not its percentage of the individual compound ingredient.

The way the meat content is declared changed in 2004: instead of giving a “minimum meat content %”, you will have to give the actual meat content % of each species which takes into account your recipe.

For example a pork sausage made from pork and beef meat could declare 'Pork Sausage (37% pork and beef meat)' or 'Pork Sausage (25% pork, 12% beef).

SFMTA guidance is available on the Members Only website and FSA guidance, at the link below. Guidance on QUID includes the butcher's calculator. Also below are links to the FSA Country of Origin labelling guidance.

http://www.food.gov.uk/scotland/regsscotland/regsguidscot/meatproductguidancescot

http://www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/pdfs/originlabellingguid0909.pdf

http://www.food.gov.uk/scotland/regsscotland/regsguidscot/countryoforiginlabelling

Meat Product Regulations

Free of charge to members, SFMTA carries out calculations of meat content in meat products. This is Quantitative Ingredients Declarations and these are different for loose products and for pre packs that are for sale in outlets outside your own shop.

SFMTA are specialists in dealing with these regulations and this service is available any member who requests help. They do not need your full recipe just species of meat present and its visual lean.

Quality Meat Scotland

Consumers are more and more interested in the provenance of the food they purchase. To avoid any potential unforeseen misleading of your customers, Quality Meat Scotland is here to help you with guidelines on how to use the Scotch Beef PGI, Scotch Lamb PGI and Specially Selected Pork logos or descriptors on meat products including processed/manufactured products.

If you are unsure on how the Scotch Beef PGI, Scotch Lamb PGI and Specially Selected Pork logos can legally be used on meat products, please contact Jack Broussine at Quality Meat Scotland on 0131 472 4042 or [email protected] for a set of up-to-date guidelines.

Authenticity

If you have concerns around the authenticity of any products or raw materials the first step would be to alert your Local Authority and the FSA will follow up as needed.

Meat manufacturers receive meat in case lots and take as gospel the labelling on the box. It would appear that in the Irish case maybe what was on the label was not what was in the box. It is stating the obvious but great care should be taken is you are receiving cases of meat that are not properly labelled or fully traceable. Please inform SFMTA of suppliers who are not labelling with the full information on the outer of the cases or on the vac packs.

Horse Slaughterhouses

Below is a list of seven slaughterhouses in the UK approved for the slaughter of horses (six are in England and one in Northern Ireland). Please note that Plant Approval No. 2163 is the establishment that the FSA has recently suspended operations. The plant in N Ireland is not currently operational as are two in England but included the full list of approved premises for completeness.

UK 2163 Peter Boddy (T/A Peter Boddy)
Licensed Slaughterers and Game Dealers) Todmorden/West Yorkshire
UK 2295 Bowood Farms Ltd
(T/A Bowood Yorkshire Lamb) Thirsk/ North Yorkshire
UK 4140 Hewitt, G and G B, Ltd Chester/ Cheshire
UK 4185 High Peak Meat Exports Ltd Nantwich/ Cheshire
UK 8070 Philip Hayman
(T/A P J Hayman & Sons) Ottery St Mary/ Devon
UK 8231 Stillmans (Somerset) Ltd Taunton/ Somerse
UK 9080 Oakdale Meats (NI) Limited Craigavon, Co Armagh

Attachments:

• FEDERATIONADVICEFebruary2013.pdf