I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Bpex executives showed off the new isotope tests to a You & Yours journalist. With consumers demanding British meat in the wake of the horsemeat scandal, here was a chance to demonstrate how reassuringly accurate the tests were in identifying the provenance of British-reared pork. At last, doubts over traceability would be put to rest. All you had to do was to buy British. And relax.

Doh! The first product it tested for the BBC - a ‘British’ pork chop on sale in Tesco, supplied by premium pork supplier Cranswick, was most likely Dutch, with a less than 1% chance it was British.

“Horsegate wasn’t just a wakeup call. It set off a tsunami of indignation, recrimination, examination and rationalisation. And the idea that, eight months on, a British pork chop can turn out to be Dutch is horrific”

Yet a number of questions remain unanswered. With the rogue chop linked back to Cranswick supplier FA Gill, the family-owned pig producer has strenuously defended the integrity and traceability of its paperwork. So what’s going on? As we reveal, Tesco this week suspended FA Gill as an approved supplier. No surprise, really. But director Charles Gill claims Tesco was asking mysterious questions in July, and stopped supply from FA Gill in August, without explanation - which suggests Tesco was on to this some time ago. And so incensed has Gill been by the constant, unexplained requests for information, from Tesco and Cranswick, it this week declined Cranswick entry to its facilities until further evidence could be supplied as to its alleged wrongdoing.

The response of Bpex also has to be called into question. You can be sure this was the last story Bpex members - including FA Gill, of course - would have wanted. But embarrassing as the situation was, as the original instigators of this test, Bpex had a long time to consider the best possible stance to take, before the news emerged on Monday’s Farming Today on Radio 4. Instead, it stated, categorically, that this was a one-off. That might prove to be the case. But until the mystery is solved, surely Bpex should have said the onus was on Tesco and its suppliers to resolve, to everyone’s satisfaction, the circumstances behind this mystery before conclusions were reached as to the scale of the problem. Its attempts to reassure instead invited suspicion.

But the biggest mystery of all is how this could possibly have happened. At all. Horsegate wasn’t just a wake-up call. It set off a tsunami of indignation, recrimination, examination and rationalisation that affected not only budget frozen meat processors and suppliers in far-flung Continental and Central European countries, but dragged in loads of innocent parties, including premium chilled ready meal suppliers such as Bakkavör and Greencore, as well as certain retailers.

This week, we interviewed Greencore CEO Patrick Coveney on the vital rebuilding work that has gone on within Greencore, among its customers, and suppliers. He is encouraged by recent progress. He even bravely volunteers the suggestion that once consumer trust is rebuilt, supermarkets will soon revert to sourcing more cheap meat and poultry from abroad. But in this critical period for chilled ready meals and chilled meat supply more generally, the idea that this pork chop incident could happen, even on an isolated basis, is horrific. Just as we thought the industry could start to put the ghost of Horsegate behind it, along comes this story and - doof - consumer confidence is once again knocked.

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