{"id":2070,"date":"2013-01-17T11:26:08","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T11:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/?p=2070"},"modified":"2013-02-06T10:38:04","modified_gmt":"2013-02-06T10:38:04","slug":"horses-for-courses-or-just-deserts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/2013\/01\/horses-for-courses-or-just-deserts\/","title":{"rendered":"Expert comment – ‘Horses for Courses or Just deserts?’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professor Andrew Fearne is Professor of Value Chain Management<\/a> and comments on the BBC article – http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-21059623<\/a> – Horsemeat in Tesco burgers case ‘may lead to prosecutions’.<\/p>\n

As thousands of Tesco\u00a0 shoppers feel the urge to gallop off to their local store to replenish their nosebags and the media hounds and Tescopolites salivate at the prospect of another stick with which to beat the big bad bully boys from Cheshunt,\u00a0 the FSA unleash their criminologists onto the DNA of a beefburger, in pursuit of the answer to questions that may well find their way into a pub quiz near you\u00a0 \u2013 was this a case of mistaken identity (after all, a horse carcass probably looks much like a cattle carcass to an Irish butcher, post evisceration, on a late Friday shift)? Was it the result of a sinister scam to scupper the supermarkets and pave the way for farmers markets and good old-fashioned butchers\u2019 fayre? or was it the result of a supply chain so stressed, running ever faster just to stand still, that it fell victim to one short-cut too many in the pursuit of survival?<\/p>\n

As I scanned the media coverage of this latest example of the fragile nature of our food supply chains, I spotted what I believe to be the likely source of the problem: \u201cSilvercrest Foods and Dalepak both said they had never bought or traded in horse product and that they had launched an investigation into two continental European third-party suppliers\u201d \u2013 sounds like the proverbial passing of the buck but in the UK due diligence reigns, so whilst our continental horse traders may well have been testing the market for retired hunting nags,\u00a0 it is the suppliers and, ultimately, the buyer who must carry the can, or at least wake up to the reality of commoditisation \u2013 offering more for less and turning a blind eye to the unintended consequences thereof.<\/p>\n

The margins on Tesco value burgers are as tight as the specifications on the raw material from which they are derived, but as retailers jockey for position so they place increasingly unsustainable demands on their suppliers, to raise standards and cut costs \u2013 all with the best intentions (remember \u2013 every little helps). Desperate to maintain the business (if only to make a contribution to overheads) suppliers make blind promises they have no hope of keeping without cutting corners \u2013 entering the commodity market, finding another supplier more desperate than they are and willing to do more for less in an effort to utilise idle capacity and stave off the inevitable. Necessity is the mother of invention and desperate times call for desperate measures\u2026 no sooner are we under starter\u2019s orders than the desperate supplier from \u2018who knows where\u2019 rationalises the decision to bend the rules and deliver a \u2018blended\u2019 solution that is not what the customer asked for but exactly what they deserve and more likely to pass unnoticed as the food police cut their own corners to make regulatory ends meet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Andrew Fearne is Professor of Value Chain Management and comments on the BBC article – http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-21059623 – Horsemeat in Tesco burgers case ‘may lead … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17593],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2070"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2077,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070\/revisions\/2077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}