Noticed this on the back of some chicken purchased in a fairly reputable local butcher. So many Irish poultry farmers going out of business and they’re importing chicken from China?

42 comments

  1. Good luck tracing that back to the source, lots of these chain restaurants import chicken and shrimp from places like Thailand.

  2. You should go and ask the butcher directly. Ask for a swap to something provided by an Irish farmer. That or tell them you won’t be shopping there again and give them the reason why?

    It’s frustrating to see alright.

  6. What sort of chicken dish was it?

    A lot of the stuff that comes prepackaged by the butcher themselves is just stuff that’s been bought in bulk via wholesalers

    I’ve a feeling this must be like some sort of shredded chicken/breaded chicken thing? 99.9% of these are not made in house

  8. I worked for a catering company about 10 years in a purchasing role… I remember being disgusted that a good deal of the chicken breasts were from Vietnamese chickens with the meat processed in the Netherlands It’s made me cautious to check origins on food products particularly meat

    I’ve also seen royal Gala apples grown in New Zealand, sent to Poland for packaging, then transported to Ireland for retail No wonder they tasted like crap

  10. I can tell you every single deli uses chicken fillets from Thailand and imagine the amounts sold every day. So it’s normal to not have Irish meats even where you would expect them to be.

  11. I suppose people when people don’t want to anymore than 1.50 for a bag of chicken nuggets this happens

  15. disgrace… believe it or not that diggers brand chicken you see in SuperValu and places freezers is imported from china – ironically the better value stuff in Aldi is European

  16. Not in any way surprised. This shit is why reading the labels is important. If there’s no label, because it’s a restaurant or deli counter, assume this is what you’re eating unless explicitly stated otherwise.

  17. We import so much chicken.

    Think about it for a second…

    Travel just three miles in any direction and count the places that sell chicken products or products that contain chicken.

    Shops, delis, restaurants, pubs/gastropubs, petrol stations, supermarkets, butchers, take aways, food trucks and fast food franchises and whatever I’ve missed.

    Try and list the sheer volume and variety of it all, fresh and frozen.

    I would wager against us having the number of chicken farms in this country to keep up with that, and have left over to either export or recycle into animal feed etc. Never mind the sheer amount of waste.

    Irish chicken is much more expensive to produce than it is to import foreign.

    China, Peru, Argentina and a long list of others are probably the main ones.
    And the conversation on what should be allowed to be called organic or free range is another thing.

    Not to mention the “produced in Ireland” and “packaged in Ireland”.

    And with everything on the rise it’s not going to get better.
    When a poor family has to decide between dinner or heat, whether to have the Guaranteed Irish chicken or the giant bag of nuggies at less than half the price isn’t even a question.

  21. This shit annoys me, same as fruit and veg. We buy in the cheapest yet export our best. That’s what happens I guess when supermarkets take over the chain. Not good for society business or people only for profit

  22. That’d be great hat chlorine washed chicken then. FFS, I thought we’d dodged that bullet.

  24. I have the origin of every animal I have ever eaten in a spread sheet.

    -Animal
    -Country of Origin
    -Date of consumption

    It gives a sense of enormous satisfaction and power when I go over my Animal Consumption List.

  25. Can you imagine the conditions that those poor animals face. It’s time to go vegan

  26. Omg 😳 And from a local butcher 🙄
    I’d call him out on it!! I actually thought local butchers did local meat – some numpty me!!

  27. I don’t think EU ethical standards for livestock are up to scratch, but I imagine they’re a good deal better than Chinese ones .

  28. Ya and a lot of the fish you buy doesn’t come from irish waters or irish fishing boats (not that anyone on this sub cares)

  29. It’s the race to the bottom – produce chicken meat at the cheapest price to sell at the highest price.

    The ‘chicken’ is injected with water to make it bigger and weigh more.

    Can you even imagine the lives of these animals in China ?

  30. You know what, I noticed something similar myself recently in a very well known Cork butcher. Not as bad as China – the chicken breasts were from Poland.

    But locals would jump off a cliff for these butchers. *”Great local butcher, pure Cork boy, support local, don’t buy cheap shite from Tesco’ses buy from XXXX”*.

    I won’t name and shame because they’re a grand butchers and have good deals. Don’t want them “cancelled”. But I was actually shocked. Thought I was buying Irish.

    The funny thing is, the “cheap shite” chicken breasts in Tesco are from Ireland.

  31. I have a vague idea what butchers shop those came from ill say this I’m not surprised. I’m going to be down voted a lot for this but fuck it. I used to work in a butcher shop and ill tell you the price of meat as a whole is on the rise in particular lamb and chicken the price of chicken has gone up six separate times in the last year its madness. our shop got it in from the Netherlands though. and before anyone says we should have gotten locally the sad reality of it is we tried that before and no one wanted to pay extra for it so we just ended up dumping the Irish chicken.

  32. Most of the butchers in my town use the same main supplier and the restaurant I work in uses them too. All the chicken breasts come from the Netherlands.

  33. I worked in a butchery within a supermarket (you can probably guess) and we’d buy 20 boxes of Dutch fillets and 1 or 2 boxes of irish. We’d display the label from the Irish on the counter so customers and inspectors would think all our chicken was Irish.

  38. I thought it’s prohibitively difficult to import meat into EU but I’m not surprised. Look at your supermarket shelves. You can get a whole plucked and gutted chicken for like €3.60. €3.60 to hatch, feed, raise, kill, process, pack and deliver one whole chicken to your local Lidl.

  39. You get what you pay for. Meat is so much cheaper now than it was relative to salaries in previous generations. Lots of people don’t care where it comes from, as long as it’s cheap.

    We only eat wild venison that my partner hunts and butchers himself (for omnivores, we should all be eating more wild venison rather than farmed meat… Deer are an invasive species to Ireland, and with no natural predators, they breed faster than the environment can support, so must be culled to protect native species and themselves from starvation) or meat bought from [the brown pig](https://thebrownpig.ie/), which is a more expensive butchers but they source from Irish farms.

    If you feel strongly about sourcing irish and ethical farming, you have to put your money where your mouth is

  40. Don’t buy heavily processed food

    Don’t buy chicken (most of the Irish produce comes from factory farms)

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