Examination of Witnesses (Questions 680
- 699)
TUESDAY 7 APRIL 1998
MR GEOFFREY
MOLLOY, DR
TONY HEANEY,
MR ANDREW
PRESTON, MR
EDDIE HONEYWELL
and MR PETER
KIRBY
680. So you boost the protein content by putting
soya in?
(Mr Honeywell) Yes, and that in turn
brings the price down because they tend to be at the cheaper end
of the market, which is the market which has been particularly
hard hit by the BSE crisis.
681. And you manufacture these products yourselves
and you do not take them from any other source?
(Mr Honeywell) We do not, no.
682. Does the same apply to Birdseye?
(Dr Heaney) Yes.
(Mr Molloy) The other obvious component
of a burger would be onion, I would guess, which is a natural
part of most beefburgers.
(Dr Heaney) The range on offer to the
consumer is actually quite wide, based on composition costs, but
there are products which are 100 per cent meat, not including
spices and things, which are available for people to purchase,
or there are burgers which, as my colleague said, may contain
cereal and rusk. All of this of course is known to the consumer
through the ingredients panel and declaration clause.
683. Do you have a minimum content of meat below
which you will not go?
(Mr Molloy) There is a legal minimum.
684. What is the legal minimum?
(Mr Molloy) It depends on the definition
of the product.
685. What is the legal minimum meat content
for a burger?
(Mr Molloy) Sixty per cent.
686. It is 60 per cent?
(Mr Molloy) Yes, and for a beefburger
it is 80 per cent.
Mr Caton
687. Carrying on with your job of educating
the Committee, you say in your memorandum that "the increasingly
stringent XAP rules for export make it impossible to operate segregated
production for home and export. In cases where a part of production
may be for export, the whole production must therefore be made
from imported beef". Forgive my ignorance, but what are these
XAP rules?
(Mr Molloy) The XAP rules come from Brussels.
They are Community rules governing the export of British beef
products and are such that there is no export of British beef
evidently, but there are very stringent rules to govern the security
of any beef exports to ensure that they do not contain British
beef. That is the purpose of them, to ensure that the beef is
traceably and controllably non-British. They have recently tightened
the XAP rules, which they are called, and they were tightened
on the 16th March and they are going to become effective very
shortly in the UK. They are already very stringent and they will
become worse, but basically what they require is that there is
continuous veterinary control by a qualified veterinary surgeon
over all material destined to go into an exported product from
the very beginning of the process to the very end, ie, from the
(very) time the raw material first appears to the time that the
product actually gets out of the factory on its way to be exported,
it has to be under continual veterinary supervision at every point
where it is handled in any way and, when it is not actually being
handled, it has to be put into a separate lockable store under
the supervision of a qualified veterinary surgeon and only taken
out under his personal supervision. It is a pretty painful process
to actually undergo, plus the fact that all such products for
export have to be sequentially numbered with the factory approval
number and things of that sort. Now, that is bad enough for any
product for export, but if you actually have got two systems running,
one where all of the meat or any meat that might at any point
in time ever get into an exported product has to be under that
control, you might say, "Well, we will have that system for
exports and we will have for our home products another system
whereby we will have meat coming in without control", but
if there is any danger of any crossover between the two (when
you are re-sourcing the product during this process) then you
find it impossible to export, so to the degree that we value exports,
though it is not a very big trade, but anything is valuable to
this industry at the moment and nobody is going to want to sacrifice
any part of his sales, but in order to protect that, the only
commercially sensible way in many cases is to import all the beef
and run one system under the control rather than two systems,
one trying to control and one not.
688. You say that it is not a very big part
of your trade, but what sort of proportion of UK frozen meat products
are exported?
(Mr Molloy) Very small, I should think.
I would hesitate to say more than 5 per cent (and) I am sure it
is less than 5 per cent, but my colleagues might be able to say.
(Dr Heaney) Specifically for Birdseye
Walls, we do a little bit of work for one or two of our sister
companies under the Unilever banner in Europe, but it is an extremely
small element of our trade.
(Mr Honeywell) Likewise, it would be
less than 2 per cent.
689. So has the BSE crisis and these XAP rules
meant an increased use of imported beef or is it fairly insignificant?
(Mr Honeywell) We use no imported beef
whatsoever. The only imported beef would be cut beef which usually
comes from South America and Ireland, but we use no imported beef
at all.
(Mr Molloy) We have a number of companies
who do because of the XAP rules and that is as we said. It is
difficult to answer the question directly because what will have
happened is that the export trade itself of course has reduced
simply because of the fact that it now must not be British beef,
but whatever export trade there is of course has caused some additional
use of imported beef in the domestic product. I would not know
really what the balance of that equation is, but it is just one
of those nuisance factors and it is one reason why some beef is
imported by some of our members.
Chairman
690. Can I, just for the sake of completeness,
ask you what "XAP" stands for?
(Mr Molloy) I am sorry, Chairman, but
it is always referred to in all correspondence just as the "XAP
system".
691. Well, if you cannot tell us straightaway,
perhaps you could write to us and let us know.
(Mr Kirby) The XAP system[2]
is where the spinal cord, the brains and part of the intestine
are completely removed, stained, and go into a separate skip and
have to go to the renderers where they are dyed and disposed of
completely, so they do not by any chance get into the human food
chain.
(Mr Molloy) I have, Chairman, in front
of me all of the latest requirements from the Ministry of Agriculture
about the XAP system and not one of them actually spells out what
"XAP" stands for, but I am sure it is "Export Approval
Procedure".[3]
Chairman: I was not intending to embarrass you,
Mr Molloy, but we just simply wondered what the "X"
stood for because it seemed it must be an unusual word.
Ms Morgan
692. You say in the memorandum that "a
substantial amount of cooked beef for ready meals is imported",
and you go on to say that the "facilities to cook to the
same specifications do not exist in the UK". Could you say
a bit more about that and what facilities the UK is lacking?
(Mr Preston) It is not so much the facilities,
but it is the volume that they can produce. If you look at meat
cooking plants to process meat for manufacturers within the UK,
the plants themselves are very, very small and they tend to produce
between five and ten tonnes of meat per week each. There are bigger
plants which produce processed poultry meat for supermarkets,
such as chicken and processed turkey, but for beef the plants
are very, very small. For a user such as Birdseye, in a normal
pre-BSE year we would be looking for around 3,000 tonnes of cooked
beef and it would mean us taking on so many different small suppliers
and the control of that would be very prohibitive. In South America
we can buy that amount of meat from three plants only, so the
control is much tighter.
693. So it is possible to cook to the same specification,
but not in the volume that you need?
(Mr Preston) Not in the volume, and you
could get almost the same finished product, so the actual cooking
methods would be different, but you would get the same end product.
694. You say that such facilities are going
to be developed in the UK. Can you expand on that?
(Mr Preston) Not as far as I know, but
my Chairman has been to the NFU and had this discussion with the
NFU where we have pointed out the volume of meat that we use and
the facilities that are not available and so far we have had no
response from the NFU.
695. So there are ongoing discussions, but you
are talking about getting them?
(Mr Preston) They are ongoing, yes. We
have no problems buying British beef if we can buy the same beef
with the same quality controls and to the same standard.
696. So these discussions are not in any way
advanced that you have written about?
(Mr Preston) Not at the moment, no. We
have left it with the NFU.
697. So you anticipate having to go on in the
same way as you are for some time?
(Mr Preston) For the short term, yes.
Mr Paterson
698. Who controls the quality in South America?
(Mr Preston) The supplying plants meet
our written specification and they comply with our quality. They
do a block and clear system in Argentina and Brazil before they
send the product. The products are then checked at our end and
we then do continual audits at the processing plants, as Birdseye
and as Unilever, because we have our own processing companies
in South America.
699. So they are your own companies?
(Mr Preston) The plants that process
the cooked beef for us are not our companies, but, as Unilever,
we have production companies in Argentina and Brazil and we use
their quality systems and their quality auditors to maintain that.
(Dr Heaney) Additionally, the EU checking
machine is also out there.
(Mr Preston) Everything we buy is EU-approved.
2 The XAP system-controls on exports of certain material
derived from foreign bodies. Back
3
It actually stands for "Export Approved Plant". Back
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