“Shop displays of beef flout EU regs” warns producers

The National Beef Association has announced that many of the supermarkets in the UK are ignoring EU retail display regulations.

A report in Farming UK quotes the Association as being ‘astonished’ at the widespread disregard of rules on shop displays for beef in the stores of large retailers. They say that many supermarkets are ‘determined’ to carry on displaying beef from different countries in the same retail shelving section.
“Some of the most obvious of the illegal displays are in England,” says NBA chief executive Robert Forster, “where shelf edge promotion loudly proclaims that only British beef is on offer [but] closer investigation reveals that small pockets of beef from the Republic of Ireland, Brazil or Argentina are covered by the same promotion material.”

Forster has stated that this poor visual merchandising “works against the English farmer and the English processor” because retailers mix cheaper imported beef with more expensive domestic products, making the imported beef look more appealing. The NBA says that it also undermines the ability to judge how much consumers are willing to pay for English beef, which often has higher environmental and quality credentials than beef from overseas.

This type of display goes against the advice of the Local Authority Co-Ordination Office on Regulatory Services (LACORS) says Forster. Last year LACORS warned retailers that meat from different countries of origin had to be physically separated within retail shop fittings, and that shop displays which suggested all goods were from a single country of origin must adhere to that standard rigidly.