Greene King fined £8,000 for misleading menus

Greene King has been hit with a bill of more than £14,000 after four of its managed pubs were found guilty of advertising shop-bought food as homemade.

Trading standards officers found the Copper Pot, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, describing Tesco Healthy Living creamy coleslaw as homemade and already fully baked farmhouse loafs as homebaked.

Eggs advertised as free range were found to be from caged hens and cheese branded as mature cheddar was actually mild coloured cheese.

At the Dirty Duck in Waterside, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Cornish Country Fresh Farmhouse Ice Cream was passed off as Cornish Clotted Cream Ice Cream.

Two other pubs, the Garrick Inn, also in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and the Coleshill Hotel, in Coleshill, wrongly described a fully baked farmhouse loaf as homebaked.

Greene King was fined £8,000 and ordered to pay costs of £6,115.50 at Rugby Magistrates Court after pleading guilty to four offences under section 15 of the Food Safety Act 1990.

The magistrates said that Greene King had acted with "gross carelessness", but there was no intention to deliberately mislead the public and no motive of financial gain.

Mark Ryder, head of Warwickshire trading standards service said: "When consumers buy 'homemade' or 'free-range', for which they are sometimes asked to pay a premium price, they should have confidence that these descriptions are accurate."

Mark Watson, representing Greene King, said it was not a case of the company intentionally misleading people, but "loose use of language" and carelessness.

He added that some of the products had been outsourced from local shops when the pubs had run out of supplies, but there was now a policy in place relating to replacing items that have run out.

Mike Gore, Greene King's commercial manager, said: "We would like to apologise to our customers for the food labelling errors we made on these menus. We would like to stress that immediate action was taken to rectify this at the time. We want to reassure our customers that this minor lapse will not happen again."