Armageddon for the grocers

THOUSANDS of families have been eating tainted food for the last 16 months, it emerged last night. Many of the items are ready meals and fast food which will have been a regular part of their diet.

The scale of the contamination with the cancer-causing dye Sudan 1 widened yesterday as another 60 products were withdrawn from sale, taking the total to 419 with dozens more still to follow.

The crisis is expected to cost the UK food industry some £100m. An industry analyst described it as 'our Armageddon'.

The alert has raised alarming questions over food safety. It exposed gaping holes in the checking of imported ingredients while the Food Standards Agency, the official watchdog, has been attacked for taking too long to issue warnings.

The FSA admitted yesterday that it could be Thursday before it can provide details of all the products involved - and a Daily Mail Investigation has found that some of those it has already named are still on sale.

All are flavoured with Worcester sauce made with imported Indian chilli which contained Sudan 1, a red dye commonly used in shoe polish and banned from food use in the EU since 1995.

The episode dramatically highlights the fact that food manufacturers rely on written assurances from suppliers about the history and safety of imported ingredients, rather than doing their own tests.

It also shows how the same ingredient can be found in an astonishing variety of processed food, from shepherds pie and ready-made prawn salad to Pot Noodle and sausages.

{1}Major outlets including Pret a Manger, McDonalds and Pizza Hut have been involved, while Whitbread, which owns Beefeater, Brewers Fayre and TGIFriday, has had to change a number of recipes.

Tony Hines, crisis management expert at Leatherhead Food International, said: 'The industry has been caught out and we are going to be castigated for it.

'This is the Armageddon, the worst-case scenario. This recall is going to cost tens of millions of pounds in terms of dumping food, quite apart from the damage to the reputation of major brands.

'Manufacturers have been relying on written assurances about the integrity of their ingredients. But obviously, that must now be called into question.

'Our advice to manufacturers is that if they have chilli powder then they need to get it tested.' Mr Hines added: 'This clearly demonstrates the vulnerability of the food chain. It is a tremendous wakeup call.

'If something as simple as chilli can be in so many products so quickly, across so many supermarket shelves, you have to think about what could be done by a terrorist.'

Hugh Pennington, a former professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University, said the Sudan 1 alert showed the food monitoring system had failed. 'The problem of contamination of chilli powder with Sudan 1 has been known for several years,' he said. 'It is apparent there has been a serious failure.'

The five-ton batch of contaminated chilli powder at the centre of the alert was imported into the UK in 2002, the year before a monitoring system was introduced.

It was sold to Premier Foods, the company behind brands such as Branston pickle and Crosse & Blackwell, which used it to make Worcester sauce in 2003. This was then sold to huge numbers of manufacturers and supermarkets as a flavouring.

The FSA admitted yesterday that the sauce has been used in hundreds of products over the last 16 months.

Premier Foods was finally alerted to the problem in January and says it told the FSA about it on 7 February. However the watchdog does not appear to have alerted major supermarkets until a week later. The public were not told until 18 February.

The process of alerting firms appears to have been confused and inconsistent. Companies received a series of different alerts, from the FSA, trade bodies and Premier on different dates over two weeks.

Tory health spokesman Chris Grayling said last night: 'It is clear that the FSA waited for nearly two weeks after first indications that there was a problem before making it public'. He said the government's response to food issues had become fragmented.

'Where threats to public health are concerned, this is unacceptable and likely to lead to slow responses,' he said.

British Retail Consortium chief Kevin Hawkins said last night: 'Some legitimate questions have been raised about why it was that the FSA became aware of the problem on 7 February and yet this time last week none of the big food retailers were aware of it. One would like to know what went on to cause that delay.'

Recent studies have suggested the FSA and port authorities are failing in their legal duty to monitor high-risk food imports. The agency defended its actions last night. A spokesman said: 'Any criticism is unjustified because we have been dependent on others to provide the full list of products. As soon as we got the list, we put them up on our website.'

The FSA also warned that companies which fail to remove suspect foods from their shelves face prosecution and unlimited fines. Chief executive Dr Jon Bell said: 'We expect businesses to remove affected products as soon as they can.

'The health risk is very small but it is important that consumers have accurate information as many products have already been reformulated.'

Premier Foods refused to discuss how long it had been supplying contaminated ingredients. The firm said: 'We are taking this very seriously and looking at all factors.'