Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Burger Content Investigations: Discussion

3:20 pm

Photo of Simon CoveneySimon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----and there are many different suppliers. Some people think that Silvercrest slaughters. It does not. Silvercrest is a processing facility, and all of the 200 million burgers per year that it processes are made up of ingredients that come from lots of different sources, including other factories - meat cuts and low-value meat, in most cases, that are made into burger material and sent frozen into the frozen stores within Silvercrest. They are then taken out and it is decided to mix a batch. The appropriate ingredients are put into the mixer and these go through the system to be turned into a burger. The reason our investigation took some time was that we had to try to match up the ingredients going into individual batches, which change every half hour, and try to correlate ingredients that were testing positive for equine DNA with burgers that were testing positive to try to find a common problem ingredient, which is where the Polish-labelled material came in. That is how the burgers are made up.

With regard to the rest of the industry, it is important to say that it is unusual for a burger to contain only 63% meat. Most burgers have a much higher meat content. Of all the burgers we tested this time, 63% was the lowest meat content. I understand that in contracts between burger manufacturers and their clients, there is a requirement to hit a certain percentage of meat in all burgers and obviously that should be adhered to, but it is not always adhered to. That is how the system and the process works.

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