A halal poultry company that supplies major supermarkets boiled chickens alive after failures at a slaughterhouse.
1Stop Halal this month admitted causing unnecessary suffering to 81 chickens at its plant in Eye, Suffolk.
The company, co-owned by Ranjit Singh Boparan, a multimillionaire known as the “chicken king”, was fined £8,000 and ordered to pay £6,000 costs.
Faulty electrical equipment meant that the birds were not stunned before being killed. 1Stop Halal also failed to cut the chickens’ throats before they entered a scalding tank used to loosen feathers on dead birds.
It meant that the birds spent two minutes in very hot water and suffered an agonising death.
1Stop Halal suggested in statements that the birds had died in a single incident in July last year.
The Times has now established that live birds were plunged into the scalding tank in ten similar incidents on different days last year. The episodes were detected during post-mortem examinations by meat hygiene inspectors employed by the Food Standards Agency.
The first incident, on July 6, involved 70 birds. There were nine more incidents involving between one and four birds over the next three months.
1Stop Halal stuns some birds by dipping their heads in an electrically charged water bath before cutting their throats. It also kills chickens while they are conscious to cater for some Muslims who want to be sure the animals are alive at the point of slaughter.
In the first incident, the company switched from stun to non-stun slaughter after a fault with the water bath meant that 1Stop Halal had to rely on its slaughtermen to cut each chicken’s neck swiftly and accurately to minimise suffering. However, the production line handles 60,000 to 100,000 birds a day and some passed the slaughtermen without being cut. This led to an argument between two members of staff over poor cutting during which 64 birds entered the scalding tank alive.
The 81 chickens involved were disposed of and not sent to retailers.
1Stop Halal said: “We deeply regret the circumstances which occurred on the 6th July, 2015, during our non-stun slaughter when up to 81 birds were caused unnecessary suffering. This occurred on our first day of operating the facility at Eye and involved a degree of human error. Employees who were involved in the incident no longer work for the business.
“Since this incident the company has invested substantially in further training [and] improved control systems and have processed more than 30 million birds.”
The company did not respond when asked about similar incidents on nine other days. It said that Mr Boparan was not involved in the day-to-day running of the business.
Morrisons said that it sold chicken from 1Stop Halal and had “a small number of their concessions in our stores”. A spokesman said: “We don’t buy the products affected by the failure.”
Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s said that they sold halal meat from Shazans, a subsidiary of 1Stop Halal, which uses chicken from the Eye plant.
Sainsbury’s added: “We have been reassured that the Shazans line was not impacted by the court case.”
Isobel Hutchinson, director of Animal Aid, a vegan group that conducts undercover investigations of slaughterhouses, said: “These deeply disturbing incidents are yet more evidence of the shocking cruelty and lawbreaking that we now know is widespread in UK slaughterhouses.
“We urgently need tighter slaughterhouse regulation to ensure that these vulnerable animals do not spend their final moments in agony.”