Safety and satisfaction are close to our hearts, which is why our quality assurance team accepts nothing short of perfection. Food safety is at the heart of what we do and underpins our purchasing policy across food and non-food items.

We work hard to ensure our suppliers meet national, European and Global safety standards and implement a strict internal Quality Management System comprising of rigorous product testing and supplier auditing.

Campylobacter

Food safety is the highest priority at Lidl UK, and together with our suppliers and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) we are committed to tackling Campylobacter in chicken. This is being achieved through several initiatives throughout the process, from the farm and processing stages to supply chain and in-store, too. These initiatives are demonstrated in our plan below.

What is Campylobacter?

Campylobacter is the most common cause of food poisoning in humans. Campylobacter is naturally occurring in the environment and lives inside many animals including chickens.

The most common ways Campylobacter is spread is through cross-contamination and undercooked chicken.

Customer advice

Lidl strongly advises all our customers to follow the FSA’s advice when handling and cooking raw chicken:

Cover and chill raw chicken, store it at the bottom of the fridge so juices cannot drip on to other foods.

Don’t wash raw chicken.

Thoroughly wash and clean all utensils, chopping boards and surfaces used to prepare raw chicken. Wash hands thoroughly with soap and warm water after handling raw chicken.

Cook chicken thoroughly, making sure it is steaming hot throughout, with no pink meat and all the juices running clear.

Lidl UK's actions on Campylobacter

Lidl joined the new Acting on Campylobacter Together (ACT) board in 2015 as a joint way of tackling Campylobacter between retailers, processors and the FSA.

Our poultry suppliers are working hard on increased bio-security on-farm to reduce Campylobacter in poultry flocks.

Our poultry suppliers have implemented innovative factory interventions to reduce Campylobacter through the process of slaughtering and production.

All of our flavoured birds are sold as roast-in-bag, reducing the need for customers to touch raw chicken.

All of our raw poultry contains hygiene information on the packaging advising customers of good practice.

Nutrition and health

Salt

Lidl UK has been working on reducing the amount of salt in own brand products for several years. We are currently working to meet the Department of Health’s 2017 salt targets as part of the Government’s wider obesity strategy.

Salt reduction is built into our new product development strategy and addressed early on in the development stage by our buyers.

Sugar

The Governments 2016 Childhood Obesity Plan laid out the goal of achieving a 20% reduction in sugar across nine food categories by 2020. Lidl UK is committed to achieving this target and will publish further work undertaken on sugar reduction as this progresses.