Canned food for AFU contains fat, skin instead of meat - journalistic investigation

She spoke about this on the Espreso TV channel.

‘It all started in the summer when we were approached by one of the Armed Forces officers who is currently fighting in the Pokrovsk sector. He complained about the poor quality of the food supplied to his battalion and the army as a whole. Most of the complaints were about canned food. He sent us a parcel with ten different canned meat and fish products for us to taste in the editorial office. After our tasting, the conclusions of the editorial staff were as follows: inedible, bad, tasteless, disgusting,’ Chip said.

The conclusions were subjective, so the newsroom sent one canned pork stew to a state-certified laboratory to check its quality. 

‘The laboratory experts concluded that the army stew we provided them with was of poor quality and did not meet state standards. In fact, it was a case of substitution of the contents of the canned food: instead of meat, there was a liquid with fat and coarse connective tissue, skin, remains and tendons,’ the investigator added.

During the investigation, she found out that the batch of low-quality stew that was sent to the Armed Forces consisted of 11,000 cans. However, the manufacturer's quality declaration for this batch stated that the quality had been confirmed and checked by the Ministry of Defense's Food Safety Laboratory. 

‘It is this department that is responsible for the quality of the products supplied to our military. This batch had a positive conclusion. Of course, we asked the Ministry of Defense to comment on this situation and provide an expert opinion from their laboratory. So far, there has been no response to my request,’ said Yelyzaveta.

The manufacturer of the stew is Menterika LLC, based in Kyiv.

‘The manufacturer does deal with meat, although not so long ago. The company was founded three years ago by serial registrars, and has been producing stew for about a year and a half. They are represented on marketplaces, but their products do not include this stew. That is, they produce stew, but not this one. I suspect that this stew is produced specifically for the Armed Forces. I called the manufacturer. The director said that he had all the documents, all the quality certificates, but he did not want to show them and threatened to sue,’ the investigative journalist said.

• On October 7, NGL.media reported that a batch of stewed pork for the Armed Forces of Ukraine was approved by the laboratory of the military unit A3466 of the Food Safety and Veterinary Medicine Department of the Ministry of Defense, which approved the supply of almost 11,000 cans of stewed pork to the Armed Forces, which was unfit for consumption.
• Later, the Ministry of Defense responded to the scandal with inedible canned food in the Armed Forces.