Baby food jar that's older than the baby

Like any young mother, Debra Gill wanted to make sure her 17-month-old daughter ate a healthy diet, which is why she gave her organic baby food.

But she was horrified when she noticed - after baby Katherine had begun tucking into her meal of rice and carrots - that the jar was more than a year past its sell-by date.

According to the label the meal should have been consumed by November 2002, making it older than Katherine herself. The jar, containing wholegrain rice and carrots, had been bought days earlier from Sainsbury's in Wallington.

Ms Gill said: "I panicked when I realised she had eaten the out-of-date food so I rang the environmental health department, who said it wouldn't have been dangerous for babies, but it still knocked my confidence. When people buy baby food from supermarkets you expect it to be in date. The jar was older than my baby."

After checking her cupboards, Ms Gill discovered two more jars of baby food, from a different Sainsbury's branch, which were six months out of date. A spokeswoman for the supermarket chain apologised for the error but insisted there was no health risk from the food.

A statement from the company said: "Sainsbury's takes this extremely seriously and immediately removed all of the product in question from stores.

"A full investigation was conducted and it was found that a very small quantity of product was incorrectly labelled.

"We immediately reviewed the labelling procedure to ensure this does not happen again. This product is sterile and therefore did not pose any health risk."

Ms Gill said she had been given replacement jars of baby food and gift vouchers as a goodwill gesture by the Wallington store, where branch manager Steve Surridge said: "We sincerely apologise to the customer for this incident. It appears that, due to colleague error, some jars of food were left on the shelf inadvertently."

The scare follows a call from MPs last week for tough new food labelling laws. Richard Bacon MP called in the Commons for "clearer, more accurate and more honest information".

A recent report by the Consumers Association's Which? magazine raised the issue of food being "repackaged" by producers to make it seem fresher than it is.

The Which? study exposed how chicken that is past its sell-by date is routinely re-labelled by producers before it hits the supermarket shelves.

According to the study this means that "fresh chicken breast" portions with a shelf-life of seven days are being sold when they are up to 20 days old, increasing the chances of food poisoning.