Day 099 - 08 Mar 95 - Page 82
1 that they know what the raw material counts are that are
2 going into the chain, so they know at the end of the day
3 product should never exceed the McDonald's specification.
4 What Mr. Walker may have said was that if they exceeded
5 what he calls "unsatisfactory count" of 5,000,000, that
6 would not necessarily prevent them from processing that
7 into a burger because at the end of the day there is still
8 an extremely good chance that that product would not exceed
9 the McDonald's specification.
10
11 MR. MORRIS: You said you did not know one example where you
12 have actually rejected any patties?
13 A. Yes, because of the checks they put in further down the
14 chain. They prevent that. The whole point of the quality
15 assurance programme is not that you test the end product
16 and then if it is no good you chuck it away. You put a
17 series of checks through the system to ensure that the
18 product you produce at the end meets the specification that
19 you are after. That is what quality assurance is.
20
21 Q. We will see.
22
23 MR. JUSTICE BELL: For your information, only because it is your
24 evidence I am interested in rather than argument, one way
25 or the other the reason that Mr. Morris put the question he
26 did is that whatever appears in the microbiological
27 standards in his actual witness statement, Mr. Walker
28 referred to "unsatisfactory" meaning more than 10 million
29 grammes when sent for bacteriological analysis when the
30 meat arrived at his plant. Do you understand?
31 A. Yes.
32
33 Q. That is merely to explain what all this has been. He stuck
34 to the 10 million at least to an extent in his evidence.
35 A. It should have read 5,000,000 in my opinion.
36
37 Q. That is what you say, yes.
38
39 MR. MORRIS: Would that be a good time to finish for today?
40
41 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
42
43 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, can I say one more word about the McKey
44 documents? We have a bit further information now. We will
45 restrict it to your Lordship and the Defendants now, the
46 edited version of this list. Of course this list is not a
47 document in the strict sense; it is a summary made by
48 McKey's for the purposes of the case, so in a sense it is
49 evidence rather than secondary evidence of that, but rather
50 than an original contemporaneous document. The position is
51 this, that for every one of those 162 tests there are
52 between five and 10 sheets of paper in existence, that is
53 for the one day, making a total of something over 1200
54 sheets of paper. There is no way of telling which sheets,
55 which few sheets it was that Professor Jackson saw on 12th
56 January last year. What we are proposing is to ask McKey's
57 to send us the five, 10 or 15 sheets that relate to Midland
58 Meat Packers for that day. We will then produce those in
59 addition to this list. Then your Lordship will decide
60 whether or not that is acceptable.
