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Tesco has vowed to improve labelling on meat packaging to provide better information on the production process.

The decision follows the Conservative party’s Honest Food Campaign, which was launched in February. The campaign included a voluntary scheme to encourage retailers to improve country-of-origin labelling.

Retailers were warned that a Tory government would introduce legislation to force supermarkets to improve labelling if they refused to sign up to the scheme voluntarily.

Tesco’s pledge follows similar agreements by Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons to make it clear to consumers where products containing 10% of meat or more meat were produced and processed.

Shadow DEFRA secretary Nick Herbert said consumers and producers would benefit from clearer labelling and criticised the government for not taking action sooner.

“The government has been talking about country of origin for months but has done next to nothing to achieve it,” he said.

“It’s been a formal government policy that it didn’t matter where food came from and there’s a growing recognition that that’s a mistake.

“In the age of food security we should be looking at increasing food production in a sustainable manner.

“We should be building the connection between farming and consumers in Britain, and farmers here have a huge opportunity to produce more.”

Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Tesco corporate and legal affairs executive director, said the retailer was happy to back the campaign.

“It is very important to provide clear information so customers can make informed choices,” she added.

Martin Haworth, NFU director of policy, urged other retailers to back the campaign.

“We hope the new EU legislation on food labelling is used to make the country-of-origin labelling clearer so that consumers can make more informed choices when they shop.

However, the new legislation will take years to come into effect so if the UK can move towards voluntarily labelling for country of origin this will allay our – and consumers’ – concerns.

“We look forward to seeing more evidence of retailer support for country-of-origin labelling on supermarket shelves.”

caroline.stocks@rbi.co.uk

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