Undercover at the supermarket (BBC Documentary)

Food Industry

Sun, Feb 10 2008

Today I found a documentary where two BBC journalist go undercover as employees at London's biggest supermarkets. One journalist applied at the Sainsbury's meat stand, while the other solicited for a job at Tesco's fish market. Earlier I said supermarkets only have one goal: to sell as much as humanly possible. What you're about to see in this this documentary can definitely fit that discription. Be warned, unhygienic practices ahead!

The documentary starts of with the two journalists preparing for the job interview. They got hired pretty quicly. The managers didn't even ask if they had any work experience. The new employees are immediately told how things are run during the first day on the job. The fish market manager said, and I quote:

Supermarkets aren't always legit [...] We sort of exploit things... Well, exploit is a bad word, let's say manipulate".

Some of the health violations the reporters see are very unhygienic and quite unsetteling:

Food is being sold way past it's sell-by date and even past it's use-by date
The Cold chain (1) (or "Chill Chain") is being broken for over 3 hours, while the maximum should be 30 minutes.
Freezers are set way lower than legal to save energy
Sell-by dates are being forged to mislead customers
Garbage bags are used to cover meat during the night
and a lot more...

(1) A cold chain is a term that describes the continuous freezing of food products, while travel from the source to the customer.

I've worked at a Fish market myself as a student, but I've never seen such unhygienic things like this! You can see the full BBC documentary at YouTube.

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