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Irresponsible
behaviour puts customers' health at risk: Lidl has been caught in a new scandal in Sweden. The German hard discounter has been selling 'meat', which in laboratory controls has been shown to contain also other ingredients. By adding citric acid, sugar, salt and soy, Lidl avoids having its steaks or its ground beef tested for the dangerous salmonella bacteria. Why? - Because this is legally speaking not meat anymore. Lidl's latest trick, which puts its customers under a considerable health risk, was uncovered earlier this week by the large Stockholm daily Aftonbladet. The country's health authorities are upset and may end up raising a court case against the discounter, if the allegations are proved right. - I have never heard about this (kind of a thing) earlier, says Barbro Ljung, leading veterinarian at the National Food Administration of Sweden to Aftonbladet. - If I should speculate (why this is done) I would say that one can, on one hand, camouflage bad meat with salt and spice, and on the other hand one can avoid a salmonella guarantee. Aftonbladet interviewed also Karin Fransson, a dietician at the Swedish meat information centre. The newspaper says that she was first speechless when they had told her about how the meat had been treated: - In Sweden one cannot do like that. Ground beef is a hundred per cent ground beef. Åke Rutegård, a leading representative of the Swedish meat producers, is upset: - This is a studious attempt by Lidl to try to circumvent the legislation, regarding both the salmonella controls and the laws requiring to mark the origin of products. It is scandalous and an insult to the consumers, he says to the Swedish farmers' publication ATL Nyheter. Lidl is marketing this product as 'German quality meat'. With the additives that the discounter has used, only 97 or 98 per cent being meat, the product is classified as a meat preparation. Therefore, the 'information' about its origin does not have to mean that the meat actually comes from Germany, only that its final treatment - adding the other substances - has been done in Lidl's home country. This is not the first time that Lidl gets exposed for shady operations in Sweden. Recently, the hard discounter was caught for social dumping and exploitation of low-wage foreign labour in its transport operations. Here, also European Union legislation was violated, and the company was forced back in line by local authorities. It is no wonder that consumer confidence in Lidl trails far beyond that of its Swedish competitors. When 90 per cent of the Swedish public had confidence in market leader ICA, only 47 per cent declared that they had confidence for Lidl. The latest example of how Lidl misleads its customers shows that there is indeed a reason to be suspicious if one is shopping for food in its Swedish discount stores.
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