NAMED & SHAMED - ASDA, CO-OPERATIVE FOOD, & ICELAND

The three supermarkets who failed to respond to our supermarket letters were Asda, the Co-operative & Iceland. Given that these are large seemingly ‘profitable’ companies (as demonstrated below), some would consider this extremely rude given their resources. Asda Asda who are owned by Walmart, an American retailer, posted a pre tax profit for 2017 of £7.1 billion. Its international business, which includes Asda, posted an operating income of £3.9 billion. If you are an Asda customer and have twitter, please tweet @asda ‘keep meat hygiene inspections independent’. The Co-operative The Co-op Group reported a fall in operating profit from £72m in 2016, to £51m in its 2017 interim results, which it stated reflects “the continuing rebuild of businesses”. Group revenues were stable at £4.6bn. You may recall they were supplied by a meat company in West Bromwich called 2 Sisters, which undercover filming by the Guardian and ITV, showed workers altering slaughter dates on batches of chickens and reintroducing to the production line, poultry which had been dropped on the floor. The Co-op is now facing an investigation by the grocery watchdog, into the treatment of suppliers by its supermarket chain, which could lead to a multimillion-pound fine, according to an article in the Guardian newspaper on the 8th March this year. The link to this article is below. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/mar/08/co-op-investigated-treatment-suppliers-groceries-code-adjudicator If you are a Co-op customer or member and have twitter, please tweet @coopukfood ‘keep meat hygiene inspections independent’. Iceland Iceland posted a profit of £160 million to the year ending March 2017. This was a 6.3% increase in their profits. If you are an Iceland customer and have twitter, please tweet @IcelandFoods ‘keep meat hygiene inspections independent’. The Other Supermarkets Of the other seven supermarkets we wrote to who replied (Aldi, Marks and Spencer, Lidl, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and Wm Morrisons), all claim hygiene is a priority for them, along with consumer safety. Given that most of them also claim to have independent audits and verification of their products of their suppliers, such as the British Retail Consortium, Red Tractor or themselves, it raises the question as to how the recent meat hygiene scares could have occurred. If the industry is fully or partially marking its own work, which does not appear to have worked, how are they going to address these problems? Might they wish to share their own audit results etc. with the public? Maybe we should write to them all again asking them this? Please keep on using Twitter or Facebook, to promote this petition. If you wish to tweet the supermarket(s) you use with the ‘keep meat hygiene inspections independent’ slogan, we would very much appreciate this. Thank you all so much for your continued comments & support. We have 103, 098 votes for the petition to date. This is truly remarkable and we are extremely grateful for every vote.