A meat processing company, Freeza Meats Ltd, based in Newry, Co Down, has been fined £42,500 and told to pay over £70,000 in costs after pleading guilty in Newry Magistrates Court to a total of 12 offences related to food fraud.

The case was brought by Newry and Mourne District Council, supported by the Food Standards Agency (FSA), and is the first investigation of its kind taken by a local authority either here or in Britain.

The offences relate to a failure to provide information on the traceability of meat products, obstruction of authorised officers by providing false and misleading documentation and the misdescription of product as Halal, when non-Halal ingredients were used.

However, perhaps the most notable offence was the regular use of hearts from cattle as a substitute for more expensive meat ingredients in burgers.

The investigation found that there was “regular and systematic substitution” of meat with cattle hearts during 2012 and 2013.

Under EU law, meat is skeletal muscle taken from a carcase, while heart is an offal product and should be listed as a separate ingredient. This was not being done.

It is not the first time that Freeza Meats has made unwanted headlines, having been caught up in the horsemeat scandal of 2013. In February 2013, samples taken from two pallets of ‘‘beef’’ stored by the company came back positive for horsemeat.

At the time, the company claimed it was storing the contaminated meat for McAdam Food Service in Monaghan. However, the media attention resulted in one of Freeza Meat’s major customers for frozen burgers, British supermarket chain Asda, withdrawing four product lines supplied by the Newry company. The loss of that contract was understood to be worth £2.5m to Freeza, and resulted in most of the workforce being laid off at the time.

Investigations

The pallets of contaminated beef attracted the attention of District Council environmental health officers. It seems that their investigations uncovered more than they originally bargained for.

In a statement released by the FSA in NI, their director Maria Jennings said that the case sends out a strong message to any food business tempted to commit fraud. She also revealed that further investigations into illegal activities associated with the company are ongoing.

Freeza Meats was set up in 1974 by the Matthews and Mackle families. They operated out of Greenbank Industrial Estate in Newry.

In recent times, the person listed as being the main point of contact for the company was Freeza Meats director Plunkett Matthews. Our understanding is that Freeza Meats no longer trades.

Matthews is a well-known meat trader with interests in other meat companies including Gourmet Island, which since 2013 has also operated from Greenbank Industrial Estate in Newry.

According to the company’s website, it is “a new supplier to the frozen food market”.

Importing

In 1999, Matthews established Townview Foods in Newry, a meat importing business. In 2012, he sold it to Roebuck Investments Ltd in a multimillion pound deal, but remained as a director of the company, while taking a small shareholding in Roebuck Investments Ltd.

Roebuck Investments Ltd is a holding company of Norish plc, a warehousing and distribution company mainly serving the food industry in southern England.