Sainsbury’s has fallen foul of Horticultural Marketing Inspections (HMI) for selling out of grade and rotten produce at its town-centre store in Northampton.
The store was found to be in breach of the EC Grading Rules for fresh fruit and vegetables on June 12, 2007 for displaying and offering for sale Brazilian Royal Gala apples and English iceberg lettuce, both claiming Class I. However, following inspection by HMI, both consignments were found to be out of grade and failed to meet the lowest marketable class - Class II of the EC Marketing Standards for regulated fresh fruit and vegetables for heavy bruise and rot respectively. A further five labelling offences where no class and/or country of origin were stated were identified against displays of aubergines, courgettes, kiwifruit and clementines.
In its defence at the magistrates court, Sainsbury’s provided mitigation which included details of training programmes, quality control checking initiatives and procedure manuals for its sales staff, as well as secondary level quality checks for all its supervisors and store mangers. Additional quality control measures employed by the retailer included regular pre-opening store walks and out of store investigators that make unannounced spot checks of quality and labelling displays. But the defence conceded that despite this there had been an inexplicable breakdown on the day that the offences were committed.
Magistrates took into account the guilty pleas offered on behalf of Sainsbury’s and the fines were reduced from £2,500 to £1,500 for each of the seven labelling and quality offences. The retailer had to pay fines and costs totalling £14,297.50.
A spokeswoman for the store told FPJ: “We are dedicated to providing our customers with quality produce and it is not our intention to mislead our customers as to the class or country of origin of a product.” But she insisted that investigations showed there were no problems with product quality at the retailer overall. “The Rural Payments Agency inspection found no issues with the quality of produce at Sainsbury's and the two incidences at our Northampton store were very unusual,” she said. “In relation to unlabelled produce, in July 2007, we introduced a new system whereby boxes of produce arrive in-store with a pre-printed tear off shelf edge label showing the required class and country of origin to ensure that produce is correctly labelled.”
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