Dawn Farm Foods is ineligible for the gold standard awarded by Bord Bia to agri-food processors to recognise “exceptional annual performance” on sustainability metrics that they achieved, the company’s managing director and Bord Bia chair Larry Murrin has said.

Murrin told the Oireachtas committee on agriculture that the ineligibility stems from issues with a company manufacturing site flagged by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on its priority enforcement list of industrial and waste-management sites.

“If we, as a member company of Origin Green are – and in this case our parent company was – named on a national priority site list by the EPA, we can’t achieve gold standard,” Murrin told the Oireachtas agriculture committee last week.

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The latest EPA priority list names the food and drink sector Arrow Group as having “odour management” issues. Arrow Group is the Queally family-owned holding company for Dawn Farm Foods.

Murrin said that “compliance with EPA goals is an important goal” and that the company is “working very hard” to get gold status again.

“We are Origin Green members. We have been since the day it was founded. I was in the room in a working group the day Origin Green was created. But we are not – there’s a difference between being a member and Origin Green gold status.”