According to the BBC, Suffolk Coastal District Council said its food safety team found a “catalogue of problems” at Tesco Extra in Martlesham, near Ipswich.
Tesco was convicted of eight hygiene-related offences from April to August 2007 following a trial on Monday. Magistrates in Ipswich fined the store £17,000 and ordered it to pay £57,000 towards the council’s costs.
Poor cleaning and inadequate procedures had meant that parts of the store had become dirty and mice were active in many areas, the council said.
Members of the public reported seeing the rodents running between the aisles.
Amongst the eight offences under Food Hygiene regulations that Tesco were convicted of included:
- Failure to control pests at a food premises
- Failing to ensure the food premises were clean
Such a large fine is representative of the risk to public health that Tesco potentially exposed its customers to. It certainly isn’t going to create good public relations with its customers that Tesco would let one of its stores fall in to this state. What Tesco could have done is to complete risk assessments throughout the store. This would have involved identifying the potential hazards that might occur and who a failure to deal with the hazard could end up harming. To combat the mice issue they might have looked to keep cleaning records for every part of the store to ensure that they could effectively monitor where had and hadn’t been cleaned and how frequently each area was cleaned.