The Vion site in Boxtel is one of the slaughterhouses in our country that go wrong most often. This is evident from figures from the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) for the period January 2021 up to and including mid-last year. Fifteen times something was wrong at the slaughterhouse in Boxtel. Nationally, dozens of fines and warnings have been issued to slaughterhouses.
The NVWA does not report per slaughterhouse which violations have been detected. The agency talks about animals that are sometimes not properly stunned before they are killed. Furthermore, the contents of intestines can be found on a number of carcasses.
‘VION Tilburg as good as spotless’
The NVWA permanently monitors 23 large slaughterhouses for red meat throughout the country. Pigs, cattle, calves, sheep, goats and horses are slaughtered here. In our province, these are slaughterhouses in Boxtel, Tilburg (both belonging to Vion), Erp, Helmond, Geldrop, Someren and Den Bosch. Only the Vion branch in Tilburg was ‘spotlessly clean’. Since January 2021, no or hardly any abuses have come to light here anyway.
At Vion in Boxtel, things went wrong fifteen times in the most recent research period, the first half of last year. In six cases this led to a fine. Nationally, more than 26,000 inspections were carried out in that time frame. They led to 62 fines and 70 warnings. That is less than the year before. In the first six months of 2021, 70 fines and 92 warnings were imposed.
‘It has to be better’
Nevertheless, the inspector general of the NVWA, Gerard Bakker, states that things go wrong too often and that things need to be improved. His organization concludes that slaughterhouses ‘are not taking sufficient responsibility at the moment.’
Supervising veterinarians and inspectors must prevent animal welfare or food safety from being (further) compromised. If they see that things are not going well, for example, the slaughter line can be temporarily shut down or a slaughterhouse can be held accountable for the behavior.
It is not known how high the fines that the NVWA can impose are. The Vion Food Group, whose head office is in Boxtel, was not yet able to respond.