Proactive Investors - British supermarkets may have been selling rotten meat unwittingly for years, an investigation has found.
A probe by Farmers Weekly has accused an unnamed food supplier in the Midlands of selling the produce to big-chain supermarkets, including Tesco (LON:TSCO), Asda, Marks and Spencer (LON:MKS) and Morrisons.
Customers are thought to have been buying the rotten meat in sandwiches, ready meals, quiches and other goods sold by the brands.
The supermarkets are now urgently searching their shelves and stocks to ensure no more meat supplied by the anonymous company is being sold to shoppers.
The supplier, which cannot be named for legal reasons, is now the subject of a criminal investigation to establish the extent of the scandal.
It previously sold its meat to food manufacturer Oscar Mayer, which supplies brands including Aldi, Subway and Ikea.
The chains are confident customers do not need to be worried about current food safety issues.
The investigation alleged that the unnamed supplier mixed "rotting" pork into fresh meat.
It also claimed that frozen meat was left to thaw out on the floor of its factory before it was used and that some goods including ox tongues were not properly heat-treated.
Two former employees claimed that sampling paperwork which would pick up bacteria such as E-Coli and Listeria was falsified.
Three people were arrested in connection with the mis-labelling of foreign food as British during a raid by police at the supplier's factory last week.