Supermarkets say food safety is a priority. But even a small percentage of failures can signal a much bigger problem.

Last week we broke the story that 85 supermarkets across the UK had failed recent food safety inspections, with Morrisons, Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s all falling foul of the hygiene checks.

Their responses were strikingly similar: all were a variation on the theme that food safety is paramount and that, on the specific or isolated occasions when standards have fallen short, these issues have been promptly addressed.

But when you add up all these ‘one-offs’ it becomes quite clear that rather a lot of stores are falling below the legal food hygiene standards. 

So when does a series of specific problems become a red flag? And is it just a coincidence that Waitrose and M&S didn’t record a single failed inspection between them? With supermarkets facing the very real pressures of food inflation, tax hikes and price wars, is it just too tempting to overlook repairs to a leaky chiller or delay a deep clean?

Rats in the kitchen 

Let’s be clear, a low score isn’t just a bit embarrassing or the absence of a gold star, it can be downright dangerous.

In one zero-rated report released to The Grocer following a Freedom of Information request, a food inspector visited a site after a customer saw a rat emerge from underneath a bakery shelf, reportedly linked to the “large pools of dirty water that had been present in store for several months”.

The inspector said they were “deeply concerned” to identify historic pest activity including gnawed insulation foam and “a large quantity of rat droppings” in the rear storeroom. The scathing report continued: “It would be impossible to spot new activity in these areas currently due to the complete disregard for cleaning and good housekeeping practice”.

Which makes it perhaps all the more surprising that the FSA – the government body responsible for food hygiene and safety – responded to our story in a remarkably similar way to the supermarkets. It insisted “standards are already high”, emphasising that 99% of supermarkets score 3 or above (generally satisfactory) and 86% have the top rating of 5.

This is likely laying the ground for an update on its plans to incorporate supermarkets’ own audit data into plans for national level regulation. Its next board meeting will mark a year since initial proposals surfaced. Taken aback by the strength of concern, it has slowed things down and met with a greater number of independent experts to try and get them comfortable with the direction of travel.

The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health wrote an open letter last September citing its concerns, including a “lack of transparency, consultation and evidence” that it said could increase the risk to public health.

Just last week, it said it had been “encouraged by the FSA’s willingness to engage on these concerns”.

Inspection calls

The FSA does not of course operate in a vacuum and nor do local authorities, which are currently solely responsible for food hygiene inspections.

A Local Government Association report on environmental health published last year found councils in England budgeted for an average of six food safety officers each. That’s if they can even find them. The report also found that food safety officers were the hardest environmental safety role to fill, with vacant roles at 73% of local councils.

Tesco Express in Haggerston, briefly famous for all the wrong reasons during Twitter’s halcyon days, has not been rated by Hackney Council since 2018 when it was awarded the top rating of 5.

But as Erik Millstone, professor of science policy at the University of Sussex, points out, it is unusual for businesses to voluntarily amplify bad news. The smarter move is to self-correct. But that raises a question: how will the big idea behind big data – that regulators can spot patterns and use that insight to targets interventions – really work?

Would a private company that relies on large supermarket audits use the same candid language as the independent food inspector above? And would those reports ever make it into the public domain?

The FSA is not proposing to do away with local authority inspections of supermarkets, but under national regulation, a drop in frequency seems inevitable.

Independent scrutiny is a powerful disinfectant. Clear safeguards to protect it will benefit shoppers and businesses alike.

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