It's the cost though - Supplier Management, if done properly takes a lot of money and resources.
If you audit every supplier every year; that'll take a lot of doing.
Even if you do audit - as soon as you turn your back the supplier could do what they want.
Which, unfortunately, is why we need so many rules, and rules, sanctions, and rules. Not because Brussels wants to make more rules, despite what your local big-company sponsored politician of choice tells you; rather because, you turn your back on the bastards for one second, and your big companies are breaking all the rules again.
They don't care, they do it all the time, and the only reason the shops are scared now is that, if they let Findus back on their shelves, and Findus do it again, the shops are liable, criminally liable, as Findus themselves are now. They're fucked, they're finished - good, they deserve it for lying.
As Rhi says above, horsemeat is more expensive than beef, so what ropey old horse bits of ropey old horses, and killed how, where, what with, when - are in this stuff? How long has it been going on? Did the stores genuinely not suspect that some of the bids for their custom were quite low, and that there needed to be a reason for that?
Or another way, lactose intolerance, nut allergies - stupid labelling, we can laugh at that? - but what if someone dies because of companies lying, or being corruptly inefficient in their labelling? Just one of those things that was too hard to call, do we all have to take a risk for it?
What if it was discovered that certain claimed meat products were actually 100 percent vegetarian? I wager if that was ever the case there would be fiercely agitated customers screaming for retribution.
Or how about, why has no company, no company at all, come out and taken the commercially propitious high-ground by guaranteeing the accuracy of the ingredients they claim for the products they sell? Do we just trust that they are being 'nice' to their currently disadvantaged competitors?
Watch, over the next couple of months, in every shop you go in, how products quietly disappear, labeling subtly changes, how healthy-eating options revert to being just labeless food products.
And the prices will creep up, and give it a year or two, gold-star products, or top-tested products, some similar naming notion, a small light blue paragraph box, the colours, design, phrasing all customer-tested for trustworthiness, explaining company ethical responsibility, explaining the company's commitment to ongoing ingredient quality-sourcing at each stage of the supply chain, by their own highly-trained experts, will appear on products, and the price will go up, because sadly, as you say Effes (Remember Effes? This was a post about Effes
) the auditing process costs money or, to put it another way, for a company to obey the law specific to the field that company operates in costs money, and companies do not like paying that money, and do not see why they should pay that money, and actually try their damnedest not to pay that money. So this time it won't be horsemeat you're eating, it'll be good old bullshit, which we've been taking platefuls of since birth, with big silly credulous grins on our faces, because we will believe anything, absolutely anything, just so long as we have to pay for it.
