Dodgy takeaways and suppliers are flogging suspect meat and fish products to customers, it has emerged.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) found 73 suspect meat and fish products during DNA testing last year.
This included ham pineapple pizzas containing turkey, lamb curries that were between 60 and 100% cow DNA, and beef pepperoni that contained 73.2% chicken DNA and 15.1% turkey.
Other tests revealed that goat meat actually contained mutton.
Of the 263 tests they carried out on meat and fish products, 73 contained undeclared species.
The figure is the highest in the past three years. Last year, it was 48 and in 2023 it was 14.
‘Consumers should have confidence that their food is safe and what it says it is,’ the FSA says on its website.
‘(If not) it can be seriously harmful to consumers, food businesses and the wider food industry.’
Its National Food Crime Unit was set up following the 2013 horse meat scandal when it emerged that a wide range of food products advertised as containing beef also had horse meat in them.
One of its chief aims is to create a ‘hostile environment’ for criminals engaging in food crime and ‘prevent food being rendered unsafe or inauthentic through dishonesty’.
(Picture: Getty Images)
Recent examples of this include several chip shops across the north west selling catfish as ‘traditional fish and chips’ to reduce costs.
The farmed fish is usually imported from South East Asia and, at around £3.40 per kilogram wholesale, is a lot cheaper than cod and haddock which typically go for £15 per kilogram.
It is perfectly safe to eat.
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Responding to the BBC report, the Chartered Trading Standards Institute said that some ‘unscrupulous businesses’ were mis-selling fish but it was not a widespread issue.
Dean Cooke, of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, said: ‘Replacing costly ingredients with less expensive ones is becoming more common.’
Meanwhile, two businesses in Lancashire were prosecuted for mis-selling kebab products last year.
Lancashire County Council’s Trading Standards tested the lamb seekh kebab and chicken seekh kebab from one of the businesses and discovered the same mix of lamb, chicken and beef in both.
A different kebab shop in Burnley was found to be selling mixed lamb and chicken kebabs that contained mostly beef.
Speaking about the cases, and the wider issue, councillor Joshua Roberts, said: ‘Inaccurate meat kebab products have become a national issue for Trading Standards, which has conducted extensive sampling in recent years to address the problem.
‘Consumers often do not know what meat they are eating and, shockingly, those making these products often don’t know either.’
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