STORY
Kismet Kebabs Limited has been fined £500,000 after a major Trading Standards investigation exposed fraudulent food mislabelling involving kebab products sold to food outlets across the UK. The Chelmsford-based company was sentenced at Swansea Crown Court after pleading guilty to one offence of fraud by false representation.
The case is a deeply damaging example of food fraud, with customers, retailers and consumers misled over what was actually being supplied. Swansea Council said products marketed and sold as lamb were found in many cases to contain little or no lamb, with lower-grade ingredients including skin, fat and other meats used instead.
Kismet Kebabs was also ordered to pay £259,298.67 in costs, taking the financial penalty to more than £759,000. The fine reflected the seriousness of the offending, which involved products being misdescribed and incorrectly labelled in relation to their meat content and composition.
The investigation was launched by Swansea Council’s Trading Standards team in 2020/21 after samples taken during a regional exercise raised concerns that products labelled as lamb kebabs did not match their declared contents. Further enquiries and formal analysis found significant discrepancies between the labels and the actual composition of the products.
Evidence gathered by the council included product samples, production records, recipes, invoices and material recovered during a multi-agency visit to the company’s premises. The court was told that the company had been manufacturing and supplying kebab products to food outlets across the UK with labels that falsely described the meat content.