17 Jul 2017

A question about : 8 year old beef in Tesco?

We bought diced beef in Tesco, but after eating it I looked at the label and it says Slaughtered in IE 2007. Does this mean it is 8 years old, kept frozen then defrosted and cut up to be sold? It also says cut in IE533 and I was able to look that up - a meat processing factory run by Kepak Ltd in Ballymahon County Longford. Apparently full of Polish workers.

We took the empty packet back to Tesco and the manager claimed it was fresh and the labelling is misleading. He took away the pack and our receipt, to consult with superiors!

Best answers:

  • No, IE 2007 reffers to the factory that the meat animal was slaughtered in.
  • So, which is worst - that the meat might be old, or that the factory has Poles in it? Can you explain how the Poles will affect the quality of your beef?
  • I don't understand why the fact that the factory had Polish workers was even mentioned.
    ha, the way things are, a Pole will give you 11 hours work packed into 8 hours in my experience.....
  • Reminds me when I used to work in Halfords. The car batteries had a sticker on them, saying the week number, in which they were charged.
    Had a few customers asked if the battery was ok, thinking that week number 1 started on Jan 1st, but the "year" started at some other date.
  • Thanks to those who found it was not a year but a code which referred to the Kepak slaughterhouse.You guys are lot quicker than the manager of a large Tescos!
    Please excuse my original Polish reference. We had been making some mild speculations about the horsemeat scandal of 2013, which was linked in my mind partly to Eastern Europe. When I googled Kepak I found a 2010 court case for defamation/libel which Kepak had won against a Polish language newspaper in Dublin. This coincidental East European link got us wildly speculating whether the diced beef could have been frozen horse meat from before the scandal, although I must say it really had tasted good in the hotpot.
    If what is presumably EU regulated labelling had been clearer in the first place we would never have got worried.
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