South Korea has expanded its focus on ensuring local food safety and authenticity to free range eggs
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South Korea has expanded its focus on ensuring local food safety and authenticity to cover the domestic free range eggs supply, seeking to eradicate false free-range claims after detecting a significant number of these in the country.
The South Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) recently conducted a random inspection on food companies dealing in eggs and egg products, with a special focus on those declaring that their products were free-range.
“We focused our inspection efforts on the various egg companies from farms to sorters to packaging companies and more which had produced an excessive number of free-range eggs for distribution when compared with the actual number of certified free-range chickens,“ MFDS Minister Oh Yoo-Kyung said via a formal statement.
“This inspection revealed that a total of 12 companies have been violating regulations by falsely displaying information regarding the breeding environment, as well as the date of production of the eggs.
“Some common tactics that were used to falsify display information on the eggs included farmers directly printing the number ‘1’ on eggs when selling to large distributors, which is the number used to indicate free-range production – our inspection found that this was the case for around 560,000 cases or sales of around KRW250mn (US$172,195).
“Other cases saw egg processors that were tasked with processing various batches of eggs using a single, most recent date of production for all the batches regardless of the real date, then selling these to other retailers and companies.”
Oh added that these violations had implications for the entire egg and food supply chain urging the relevant companies to comply with authenticity standards.
“The correct egg markings should state the date of production/laying (four digits), the farm unique identification number (five digits), and the breeding environment number (one digit) – the last number is what indicates free-range with at least 1.1 m2 of space per bird (1) versus flat pens in a barn with 0.1m2 per bird (2), improved cages with 0.075 m2 per bird, or conventional cages with 0.05 m2 per bird,” she stated.
“Companies that have failed to comply with these standards and made fraudulent claims about the origins of the eggs will receive both administrative action from the various local governments as well as be subject to legal action in order to ensure the unfair profits made off of unsuspecting consumers are recovered.”
System-wide management
MFDS also highlighted that additional efforts will also integrate the use of data management to prevent such violations.
“We will work to create a safe environment for the distribution and retail of animal-based products moving forward with distribution information sourced from the national Food Administration Integrated System, Animal Welfare Livestock Certification system, Livestock Product History Management system and more,” it said.
“This will be used to strengthen direction as well as future inspection efforts, in order to prevent any similar violations from recurring moving forward.”
