Thousands have been eating 'organic' meat that wasn't

Have you been eating meat that you thought was organic, but wasn’t?  If you have your meat delivered to your home, and you live in the UK, there’s a good chance you were one of the victims of a £500,000 organic meat scam.

The director of one of the UK’s largest suppliers of organic meat has been jailed for 27 months after he was found guilty of re-packaging cheap produce he bought from his local supermarket.

Neil Stansfield, of One Food Ltd., which also traded as Swaddles Organic, was behind a £500,000 scam that had sold non-organic meat as organic for five years.  Stansfield, who admitted the charges, bought his meat from his local Tesco and Waitrose supermarkets in Daventry, Northants, and relabelled it as organic, before delivering it to customers’ homes around the UK.

The scam was initially carried out by One Food, but it was extended to include Swaddles Organic after it purchased that business in 2006.

Employees told trading standards officials that they were ordered to remove all labelling and any non-organic ingredients in the meat before repackaging and re-bagging the contents as organic.

Officials reckon that around 28 per cent of the meat being sold by One Food was not organic, which equates to around £500,000 of sales over a five-year period that began in around 2002.  

(Source: Northamptonshire County Council website).