The code on your meat is useless

Overview

Every pack of British meat carries an establishment code - a number stamped in a small oval identifying the facility where the meat was processed. The Food Standards Agency assigns one to every approved slaughterhouse and cutting plant in the country.

It tells you nothing.

There is no official British list that cross-references establishment codes against halal certification. Look up a code in the FSA database and you get a name and an address. Whether that facility is a halal slaughterhouse, you cannot find out.

It gets worse. The code on your pack is often not the slaughterhouse code at all. A slaughterhouse (SH) kills the animal. A cutting plant (CP) portions the carcass. They are frequently different facilities. The stamp on your packaging belongs to whichever site last handled the meat — usually the cutting plant. The slaughterhouse, and what happened there, carries a different code that never reaches the consumer.

For everything outside this list — beef, chicken, pork, lamb sold domestically — no equivalent exists. The code is on every pack. The means to get any information from it is not.

Schools, prisons, hospitals

We know that millions of halal chickens are being served in schools, prisons, and hospitals across the UK. We cannot prove where they came from. Private catering companies are under no obligation to disclose their suppliers. Slaughterhouses are under no obligation to disclose who their customers are. The institutions serving the food are not required to tell the people eating it where it was produced or how the animal was killed.

The code that should make this traceable is on the packaging somewhere in that supply chain. Without a halal list to match it against, it remains unreadable — and the companies involved have no legal reason to help anyone read it.