The Bottom Line
- Hygiene rules are all-encompassing: Food safety obligations apply throughout your entire process, from the initial production line to the final dispatch warehouse. A violation discovered at any stage can lead to a fine.
- Repeat offenses are costly: Fines can be doubled for a second violation of the same legal provision within five years, even if the factual circumstances of the two incidents are completely different.
- Don’t get lost in the details: Arguing that a regulator should have applied a more specific rule is unlikely to succeed if the violation is found outside that specific stage. General food safety duties have a broad and powerful reach.
The Details
A Dutch slaughterhouse has lost its appeal against a €5,000 fine from the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA). The case began when an inspector discovered faecal contamination on a calf carcass in the company’s dispatch area. Critically, the meat had already passed all internal quality checks, including a designated Critical Control Point for contamination, and was approved for export. The NVWA fined the company for violating the general EU food hygiene rule that requires foodstuffs to be protected from contamination “at all stages of production, processing, and distribution.”
The company’s core legal defense was that the regulator had applied the wrong rule. It argued that since the contamination likely occurred during the slaughtering process, the NVWA should have used the more specific hygiene regulations that govern that particular phase. This, the company hoped, would force the regulator to prove precisely when the contamination occurred. The District Court of Rotterdam firmly rejected this argument. The court ruled that since the violation was discovered late in the process—in the dispatch area—the regulator was correct to apply the broader, all-encompassing hygiene rule that covers every stage.
The court also upheld the regulator’s decision to double the fine based on recidivism. The company had received a fine for violating the exact same legal provision less than five years prior, although that incident involved contamination from a leaking roof. The business argued that the two events were factually unrelated and shouldn’t be linked. The court was unpersuaded, stating that the legal test for a repeat offense is whether the same rule was broken. Since both incidents constituted a failure to protect food from contamination under the same article, the doubling of the penalty was deemed correct and proportionate.
Source
Source: Rechtbank Rotterdam
