The horse meat scandal caused mayhem in Britain last year when it was revealed that food being sold in Britain that was labelled as beef actually contained horse meat or horse DNA. Since the revelation The Food Standards Agency has released their latest quarterly report of over 6,000 products, none of which were found to be contaminated with horse meat or horse DNA.
Products cannot contain more than 1% horsemeat or horse DNA before they have to be reported and in this last quarterly report none of the 6,069 products that have been tested have been at or above this 1% threshold.
The UK beef industry took the horsemeat scandal extremely seriously as it meant that beef sales across the UK dropped significantly. Of tests carried out since February 15th 2013, the Food Standards Agency have said: “”a total of 38,473 beef results tested for horse meat/DNA have been submitted by industry… Of these, 47 were positive.”
They went on to explain:
“An extensive programme of testing by UK industry and local authorities started in February 2013, at the request of the FSA. These tests were carried out to check that beef products on sale or supplied into the UK food chain were accurately labelled and did not contain horse meat/DNA, following the discovery of horse meat being used as beef in a range of food products sold across Europe.”
