Food-to-go supplier Bread Spread has been ordered to pay almost £47k after it was found to have broken hygiene rules in production.
A hearing at Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court on 4 March saw Premalkumar Patel, director of the Southall-based business, plead guilty to 21 counts of serious food hygiene failures.
Bread Spread manufactures a variety of sandwiches and other food items at a unit in Balfour Business Centre, which it supplies to universities, colleges, and independent retailers across the UK.
The court heard evidence that the company had mislabelled sandwiches with the wrong shelf life and had repeatedly ignored warnings to raise its hygiene standards and failed to comply with improvement notices from Ealing Council officers.
On 7 May 2024, the UK Health Security Agency made the council aware that potentially life-threatening bacterium listeria monocytogenes had been detected in two sandwiches produced by Bread Spread. The bacteria was also present in a swab sample taken from a tomato slicer, even after it had been cleaned and disinfected.
During a visit to the factory the next day, council officers deemed the production of Bread Spread’s ready-to-eat foods as an imminent risk of injury to health and served it with a Hygiene Emergency Prohibition Notice to immediately stop operations. Despite this, a further unannounced visit later in May found the business still producing foods under poor hygiene conditions.
On 11 May, the national Food Standards Agency issued a country-wide recall of all sandwiches including French sticks, soft rolls, torpedo subs, and baguettes produced by the company under its brand names Bread Spread, Orbital Foods, and Perfect Bite. The supplier’s poor traceability records caused delays in quickly removing potentially unsafe food from the market.
The director and the company were each fined £14,000, with both ordered to pay a £2,000 victim surcharge. Additionally, Bread Spread was also ordered to pay £13,835 in prosecution costs bringing the total fine up to £46,827. Manager Ronak Patel plead guilty to two charges and received a £673 fine for one charge and had to pay a victim surcharge of £269.
Councillor Kamaljit Nagpal, Ealing Council’s cabinet member for decent living incomes, said: “Thanks to swift and coordinated action by council officers and our partners at national agencies, this business has been held accountable for the filthy conditions in its factory.
“We will always take the strongest possible action against companies which choose to ignore basic safety rules and put their customers at risk,” added the councillor.
A spokesperson for Bread Spread told British Baker that the company had since renovated its production flooring for compliance whilst implementing a sampling plan and training its 10 staff members to avoid mislabelling. It was also in the process of implementing SALSA standards with the help of consultant, and had already put in place a new traceability system and was planning to do a mock recall exercise.
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