They bill themselves as “THE HOME OF THE WHOPPER” and now it’s really true because the last lie they told was a whopper– the one where they said there was no horse meat in their burgers. Wow! It was the biggest WHOPPER of them all. What a bunch of liars.” [Damien LeGallienne, TheDamienZone.com]
Burger King has tonight admitted that it has been selling burgers and Whoppers containing horsemeat despite two weeks of denials. But sadly, the denials were found to be meritless. There was indeed horsemeat in the Burge King Burgers.
The fast food chain, which has more than 500 UK outlets and thousands in the USA, had earlier given a series of ‘absolute assurances’ that its products were not involved.
However, new tests have revealed these guarantees were incorrect in a revelation that threatens to destroy the trust of customers.
“When people find out that Burger King is serving a mixture of beef and horsemeat, that will be the end of Burger King in the UK and very probably the company will sink so low in the USA that it could never recover,” said a spokesman for WIF Food Product Services in Kent with branches in Boston, USA.
It also raises serious questions about whether the food company, which sells around one million burgers a week in the UK and hundreds of millions in the USA, has any good idea about what goes into its products.
“They buy meat from burger dealers and they don’t bother to look or care what’s in that meat. It could be camel meat for all they know. You might never find out what you’ve been eating at Burger King,” continued the WIF Spokesman. “Burger King has a moral obligation to its customers but they simply don’t seem to know or care to know.”
The contaminated burgers were made by the Irish-based processing company, Silvercrest, which is part of the ABP Foods Group.
The same company also made tainted burgers for Tesco, Asda and the Co-op, among others.
Burger King has faced allegations of orchestrating a cover-up of its links to the horsemeat scandal in order to give it time to find an alternative supplier.
It is currently shipping in tens of thousands of burgers from suppliers in Germany and Italy in order to meet demand at its UK outlets.
It is known that the management at Silvercrest has been using a series of non-approved ingredients in their burgers for a range of household name brands.
These included meat off-cuts, including horse, that were imported in large frozen blocks from Poland.
The contamination has been going on since at least last May and potentially for up to one year, according to evidence presented to MPs earlier this week.
Tonight Burger King abandoned its earlier denials, saying: ‘Four samples recently taken from the Silvercrest plant have shown the presence of very small trace levels of equine DNA. According to genetic scientists, small traces of horse DNA means that there’s an awful lot of horsemeat in the whopper.
The slogan used to be: IT TAKES TWO HANDSTO HANDLE A WHOPPER, but in this case, you might have to use both hands to steer the horse’s reins.
