Horsegate transcript

Introduction

This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.

I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.

Episode

Kate Hartley: I was so looking forward to getting into this crisis because I know, Tamara, you have some thoughts on it, as you were working with one of the brands that was involved. So today, we’re going to cover a scandal that implicated some of the biggest food brands in the UK, including some of the biggest supermarkets. It saw food products recalled all over the UK, cost the food industry hundreds of millions of pounds in lost sales, and collapsing share prices. It called into question public trust in our food sources.

Tamara Littleton: And as you mentioned, this one is a little bit close to my heart, which we will come to. But can you share just for our listeners, how did this all start? What happened?

KH: So it started back in November 2012 when the Food Safety Authority in Ireland did tests on a range of cheap, frozen ready meals and burgers, and found DNA from horses and pigs in meat that was being sold as beef. So one beef burger sample from Tesco had 29% horse meat in it, which is not great, particularly here, I would say, where we sort of think about horses as being pets. I mean, I don’t have a pet horse, just to be really clear.

TL: Let’s just clarify that.

KH: Just to clarify, but you know, we do think of them as domesticated animals, and we love them. We just don’t like to eat them.

TL: In the UK, culturally, it is very different.

KH: Very, very different. So three factories were initially identified as the source of the contaminated beef, and two of them were operated by a company called ABP Food Group, which processes beef and is one of the main suppliers to the food industry of beef. ABP then found out that horse meat had gotten into its supply chain through supplies that it was then using in Poland. So the supply chain started to get quite complicated and quite long. And then more and more stories started to be uncovered.

There was a story of one cold store of meat in Northern Ireland where they had these blocks of frozen meat that were found to be 80% horse meat. And again, this had come through the supply chain of imported meat. Tesco, who we’ve mentioned, had a real problem with frozen ready meals that were found to contain horse meat. They were in Tesco and in Aldi, and a Findus beef lasagna had what Findus originally said was a labelling issue, whatever that means, presumably not labelling beef as horse.

So those products were withdrawn from supermarket shelves as well. They were made by another supplier in France called Comigel. We’ll come back to the supplier issue later on. It was later found that the Findus beef lasagna had up to 100% horse meat. Now, I don’t know what up to 100% horse meat means. That could mean 1%, but I’m guessing it means a lot closer to 100 than to one. It was a huge amount. There have been instances in the food industry where trace elements of another meat have gotten into food. For example, sometimes traces of pig DNA can be found in a beef burger, which, again, is not ideal, but some of that can be put down to things like cross-contamination or facilities not being cleaned properly in processing factories. It’s not great, but it can happen. But this was on a completely different scale from that.

This really showed that there was serious fraud at play, substituting horse meat for beef. It wasn’t just in the UK either. These things were happening across Europe as well, but I think in the UK, it was particularly resonant because of our cultural pet feeling for horses. More and more meals kept being uncovered, and the government intervened. David Cameron, who was then Prime Minister in the UK, said that anyone found to be deliberately passing off horse meat as beef would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Initially, we were all told that this wasn’t a safety issue.

Horse meat can be eaten; it is eaten in other countries, and of course, it’s really important to know what you’re eating. But technically, we were told it wasn’t unsafe. But then, that turned out not necessarily to be true. The EU started testing processed meat for a drug called Bute, which is an anti-inflammatory drug in horses that can be really harmful to humans. Any horse that has been treated with Bute should not enter the human food chain, even in places where horse meat is more commonly eaten. There were implications that Bute entered the food chain in France, causing chaos even in a country where it is eaten more regularly.

TL: I mean, this is the stuff of nightmares. It’s weird going back; it was such a big issue at the time, and it feels almost like an apocalypse film. So how does it even happen?

KH: Well, the food supply chain is unbelievably complicated. The Guardian did some really good analysis of this whole scandal. They reported that KPMG said there were about 450 points at which a supply chain can break down in the food industry. Now, that’s a lot of potential for failure. It’s just a massive, complicated network of different suppliers supplying each other. It’s almost impossible to regulate, I think.

TL: What was the actual impact on the companies involved, both in terms of finances and reputation?

KH: It was massive. A lot of the major supermarkets were involved, including Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, and Iceland. They had to take 10 million burgers off their shelves. It’s worth pointing out these were mostly their value ranges, so it tended to be the cheaper meat products. Tesco definitely took the brunt of it in terms of reputation, with £300 million knocked off their market value. The impact on suppliers was huge too. ABP suspended work at one of its plants, and Burger King switched its supply from ABP. The Guardian reported that ABP lost about £39 million in contracts over that period.

Another supplier, SilverCrest, was dropped by Tesco. The impact on other supermarkets who weren’t technically affected was also huge. Waitrose and Sainsbury’s ended up withdrawing beef products even though they hadn’t tested positive, just to restore trust. Sainsbury’s sales ended up going up as a result. Interestingly, McDonald’s brand perception dropped because Burger King was found to have horse meat in burgers. Even though McDonald’s wasn’t affected, the scandal still impacted them. It shows how things can spread across an industry to an unaffected company.

It’s a big lesson for organisations to watch what’s happening in their industry because it could have an impact on them, even if they’re not directly affected.

TL: So if that was the brand impact, what about the public reaction to the crisis? What can you tell us here?

KH: As you would expect, consumer trust was right down, and sales were hit really hard. Supermarkets like Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, that were sourcing meat from the UK and Ireland, did a lot better. They saw sales and trust go up. Long-term, there wasn’t as much of an impact, but short-term, there was a huge impact. One poll showed that 15% of consumers would no longer buy cheaper meats because they wanted to know where their meat came from. That concern lessened over time, but at the time, there was a significant public outcry and panic about what people were eating.

TL: And there were top-tier memes going on as well, weren’t there? Let’s go back to that time in 2012. We were actually involved in this because, well, I didn’t cause it, just to say that. Tesco was our client at the time, and we were supporting the team when all of this broke. It’s worth saying that Tesco was recognized for how they handled it on social media. They were quick to respond and transparent. There were lots of jokes, like “my little pony” and “I’m having nightmares, I’m feeling a little hoarse.”

At the time, we managed to bring some calm to the chaos, but then the client posted on social media, “Well, that was a tricky week. I think we’re going to hit the hay now.” It went absolutely crazy, and we had to start all over again. But that was a key time for the public to show their dissatisfaction but also their humour, which maybe made things a little bit easier eventually.

KH: Can we just have a moment for the poor social media managers who had to deal with that? What a nightmare. No pun intended.

TL: I’m still traumatised. But aside from Tesco, what was the response of the other supermarkets?

KH: Well, as you said, Tesco’s response was great, and so was Sainsbury’s. We’ll look at that again in a minute. Findus said this is a mislabelling issue, which is not ideal, particularly if the mislabelling is, “I haven’t told you this is horse meat.” Iceland’s response was the oddest. The CEO, Malcolm Walker, did an interview with the BBC for Panorama. To be fair to Iceland, he invited them in and was really proud that his beef burgers were beef. But he was challenged by Panorama, which is never going to be easy. The interviewer said the Irish Food Standards Authority had found 0.1% horse meat in Iceland beef burgers. The CEO’s response was, “Well, that’s the Irish, isn’t it?” That caused a backlash.

Under UK tests at the time, nothing under 1% would show up, but in Irish tests, it did. While he said there was no horse meat in there, there was a trace. He also got quite defensive and blamed the scandal on “dodgy cutting houses and backstreet manufacturers.” He called it a “storm in a teacup.” He said Iceland doesn’t sell cheap food and that he wouldn’t eat an economy food product. But in the Panorama programme, he’s seen holding up a pack of four beef burgers for £1.50, which probably would classify as cheap food. The rest of the supermarkets were more measured.

Justin King at Sainsbury’s, who weren’t impacted, was really good at his response. He wasn’t smug and just said, “There but for the grace of God, go us.” He used the opportunity to reiterate that Sainsbury’s only sells UK and Irish-sourced beef and that they’ve been independently DNA testing products for 10 years. It shows what we always say to brands: a crisis is an opportunity to really reinforce your values, and Justin King did that.

TL: That’s quite a classy response from Sainsbury’s. You mentioned in the intro about criminal gangs, workers’ rights, and animal welfare. Can we go back to that? What’s the story there?

KH: The Guardian led the investigation into this, and it uncovered an entire network of people across Europe smuggling horses across borders for meat. ABP was buying some of its meat from a Dutch businessman, Willie Selten. He was hiring workers from Poland, who said they were being told to cut up and mix horse meat into beef. They had been relabelling horse meat as beef for five years. They were being paid cash to do out-of-hours shifts where they did this. Selten denied it all, saying he was only doing that for pet food. He was arrested for fraud and false accounting, found guilty of falsifying documents, and sentenced to two and a half years in jail.

But 336 tonnes of horse meat had already passed through his business in a two-year period. The Guardian traced his sources to a Cheshire slaughterhouse called Red Lion, where hidden cameras found horrible abuses of animal welfare. One of their sources was a horse dealer from Northern Ireland, who was trafficking unfit horses and donkeys, hiding illegal drugs in horse lorries, and some horses were testing positive for Bute.

There was a whole network of criminality, and it shows how difficult it must be for supermarkets to know where their meat comes from. They buy from a supplier in good faith, but that supplier has another supplier, and so on, making it easy to lose track.

TL: Looking back to this hitting the headlines, how did this change things? Would you say it changed a lot?

KH: It did expose some real problems in areas like food labelling and the supply chain. It exposed questions about how much we are prepared to pay for food and what we consider cheap. A few things changed for the better. Food agencies are now much quicker to share information, there are better legal controls of the food supply chain, and there’s more cooperation across borders to target food fraud. DNA testing has improved, and checks on meat plants have significantly improved. A lot changed for the better.

TL: But could it happen again?

KH: The National Farmers Union and the Chartered Trading Standards Institute said there’s a real crisis in trading standards funding and staffing levels, which means they think there’s a real risk this could happen again. Reports suggest it is happening again, maybe not on that scale, but enough to be worrying. In February 2023, a batch of illegally imported meat and eggs was intercepted in Suffolk.

In October 2022, customers at Dover found 21 out of 22 food import vans spot-checked in a 24-hour period had illegal imports of animal products. There was a raid in Belgium, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain that seized 17 tonnes of horse meat. In 2022, an investigation into a criminal network selling horse meat led to 41 arrests.

There’s still a lot of it going on, and it’s not just in the meat trade; there’s food fraud in herbs and cooking oils too. The reason we know more about food fraud now is because more testing is done as a result of the horse meat scandal, but it shows there’s still a long way to go before we feel the trust we should in our food supply chain.

Break

KH: I am really, really excited to have with us today the amazing Dr. Mukta Das, who is a food anthropologist and researcher and the founder of a food and change research consultancy called Clarified. She’s worked with the incredible two Michelin-starred chef Andrew Wong. She’s appeared on our TV screens and radio on programmes like Radio 4’s Food Programme and the BBC’s Inside the Factory, and she’s here today to talk to us about the horse gate scandal. Hello.

Dr Mukta Das: Thank you so much for inviting me.

TL: Mukta, I’m going to jump in with the first question. Obviously, you’ve heard what we’ve been discussing, but why was this such a big deal? Is it just our aversion to eating horses?

MD: That’s a big thing, isn’t it? Really?

KH: It is a big thing. Actually, it is such a big deal because food is a daily thing. Of course, it’s going to be very emotive. It’s something we put in our body every day, so it’s going to hit where it hurts. But then, when you think about that question about our aversion to horses, it’s interesting to think about who you mean by “us.” What is our aversion to horses compared to someone else’s aversion to horses? It’s a way to think about national identity and who gets to define what we eat and don’t eat.

Going back to the key question of this aversion, it’s interesting that when I heard you and Kate talk about the scale of the horse meat scandal and how it spanned different countries, what struck me was that it was a multinational problem.

Ultimately, the EU countries of France, Spain, and various others were implicated, including the UK, which is now outside the EU. We kind of centred the issues around where the scandal originated in Romania. Romania was the bogeyman of the supply side of these issues. There were abattoirs in Romania where horse meat was processed into foods legitimately, and as that meat moved across borders, it was mislabeled, intentionally or not, into beef and processed into ready meals and other food products.

So, what you had there is a kind of us-them, our aversion, their food practices. It’s an interesting identity process in terms of externalising where the problem is, even though the food came into our borders. It was various EU countries and the UK that mislabeled it intentionally or otherwise. There were arrests made in England and Wales, for example, where meat came here as horse meat and was labelled as such but then ended up being processed into beef.

KH: So, it is actually a mislabeling scandal. It’s not about eating our pets. It’s about not knowing what’s in our food. It’s about mislabeling and us thinking we’re buying one thing but buying another.

MD: To some extent, yes. Where it’s legitimately eaten, it was labelled as such and put into the food system as horse meat. The mislabeling and aversion geography happened near home, where the retailers and vertically aligned food companies would have had to have traceability and transparency about where their food came from. The real problem is that the food system is so complicated, and we aren’t entirely sure what’s right to eat within this system. There’s a mislabeling element, but there’s also a racialized element of where the problem is.

KH: That’s really interesting. You talked about how complex this system is and how little we know about it. Is that something prevalent in the food industry? Do we know what goes into our food?

MD: It’s a big question. As you’ve seen from this scandal, it’s difficult to know what’s precisely in our food, and we’ll have more scandals in the future. The cost of living crisis, geopolitical problems, and other externalities mean we struggle to figure out what’s in our food. It’s about positionality. If you’re an artisanal cheesemaker in the UK, supplying to a place like Neal’s Yard Dairy, the supply chain is tiny. You have hardly any middlemen. But for average households, there’s a class distinction between a short, transparent supply chain and a long one where food becomes cheaper and cheaper. Not just transparency but whole foods and nutritionally dense foods are the real issue.

KH: It’s interesting because it’s all very well to say we need to shorten the supply chain and know where our food comes from, but there’s a massive cost to that. Most people can’t afford to take on that cost, and this hit the budget end of food rather than the artisanal end.

TL: Given everything you just said, Mukta, as consumers, what questions should we be asking about our food?

MD: As consumers, we’re asking the right questions. The problem is whether we’re getting the right answers. With the horse meat scandal, consumers moved quickly, and companies had to respond. But consumer action doesn’t change a system. We’re still struggling with traceability and transparency. The focus should be on companies themselves, not to demonise them, but to recognize that there are factors like technology, market demand, and consumer price sensitivity at play. Companies should be focusing on sustainability and regenerative agriculture from the get-go. We need a philosophical or political will shift to see interesting decisions around investments and supply chain management.

KH: We started talking about the specific problems in the supply chain, but we need to look at the sustainability of our food supply as a whole. It’s a much bigger issue.

MD: Absolutely. It’s about the sustainability of our entire food supply. That’s the real issue.

Outro

You’ve been listening to “What Just Happened?” with Kate Hartley and Tamara Littleton. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review.