South Korea has expanded its focus on ensuring local food safety and authenticity to cover the domestic free range eggs supply, seeking to eradicate false free-range claims after detecting a significant number of these in the country.

The South Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) recently conducted a random inspection on food companies dealing in eggs and egg products, with a special focus on those declaring that their products were free-range.

“We focused our inspection efforts on the various egg companies from farms to sorters to packaging companies and more which had produced an excessive number of free-range eggs for distribution when compared with the actual number of certified free-range chickens,“ MFDS Minister Oh Yoo-Kyung said via a formal statement.

“This inspection revealed that a total of 12 companies have been violating regulations by falsely displaying information regarding the breeding environment, as well as the date of production of the eggs.

“Some common tactics that were used to falsify display information on the eggs included farmers directly printing the number ‘1’ on eggs when selling to large distributors, which is the number used to indicate free-range production – our inspection found that this was the case for around 560,000 cases or sales of around KRW250mn (US$172,195).

“Other cases saw egg processors that were tasked with processing various batches of eggs using a single, most recent date of production for all the batches regardless...

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