Two of Britain's biggest and most profitable supermarkets are tonight accused of putting public health at risk after secret filming revealed members of staff deliberately extending sell-by and use-by dates on fresh food - and of selling food unfit for human consumption to unsuspecting customers.
In a series of health and safety legislation breaches being broadcast in a programme for BBC1's Whistleblower, counter staff at two branches of Sainsbury's and Tesco falsify food temperature records and flout basic rules of food hygiene such as using different knives for fish, raw meat and cooked meat to prevent cross-contamination of bacteria.
Undercover footage shows the factory floor of a major supplier of ready meals to Tesco cross-contaminated with urine and faecal matter from employees' boots, and a farm which supplies chickens to Sainsbury's where a bin of dead birds crawling with hundreds of maggots is alongside the area for live birds being reared for sale.
Sainsbury's, which serves 16 million customers every week, this month unveiled full-year profits of £380m - up 42% on last year. Tesco is the UK's largest supermarket and last month announced a record annual profit of £2.7bn.
A whistleblower - a former employee of Sainsbury's and Tesco - alerted the BBC after being regularly asked to mislead customers about the quality and freshness of food. Other complaints led to the six-month undercover investigation by two BBC reporters who got jobs with Sainsbury's and Tesco and secretly filmed their daily working lives over several months. Journalist Audrey Brown got a job as a full-time general assistant on the delicatessen counter at Sainsbury's in Didcot near Oxford. Her colleague James Griffin got a job as a fishmonger at Tesco in Woodford Green, north-east London.
Sainsbury's said in a statement: "Sainsbury's takes any matter relating to food safety extremely seriously. On receipt of the limited information provided by the BBC, we launched an immediate investigation at our store. As a result, we have identified some instances where our procedures had not been followed correctly at that store and have taken the necessary action to ensure these matters are addressed.
"Any local breakdown in procedure is entirely unrepresentative of the hard work and commitment to the high standards displayed every day by Sainsbury's store colleagues.
"Based on the information provided in advance by the BBC to Sainsbury's, we cannot see that food safety was in any way compromised."
Tesco said: "This programme paints a deeply false picture of our business. We looked vigorously at the store and our suppliers and we are satisfied that any incidents captured on film were not representative of the high standards we insist on. That said, we take allegations of this nature very seriously and, as a precaution, have retrained all counter staff in this store.
"Our customers should not be fooled into thinking that this programme has uncovered systematic failures or that the public is at risk. Customers trust us to provide them with safe food of the highest quality and we would never do anything to jeopardise that trust."
· Whistleblower, BBC1, 9pm.
