Beef Counterfeit Scandal of Japan Ham

Beef Counterfeit Scandal of Japan Ham

Abstract

In recent years, multiple violations occurred in Japan's food retail companies. For example, the sale of expired food, counterfeited, altered the original place of production, even producing countries and so on. These scandals put a great impact on society and the peaceful lives of people. In this article, I will introduce the beef counterfeit issue occurred in 2002. Also, I will analyze the ethical problems in relation to this issue and seek for the measurements to prevent recurrence.

The Ethical Issue

The Japan Ham Group disgraced in 2002. For applying to the system that the government provide the special subsidies to domestic beef, Japan Ham counterfeited the overdue imported beef as domestic beef. This was discovered in August 2002. The detail was that the beef had been disguised at the discretion of 3 sales manager of branches. Although just before the case is discovered, Japan Ham had kept double-digit sales growth, this scandal made the sales began to fall and the disguised production were retrieved. In those days, the top profit was Snow Brand Milk Products, the second was Japan Ham in the food industry (excluding alcohol, tobacco). It took four years for Japan Ham to take the same earning back.

Analysis

The sales of Japan Ham was up to 960 billion yen in 2001. The number of employees was 27,000 people at that time. The productions of Japan Ham included ham, sausage, fisheries, dairy products, vegetables, health food, freeze-dried, sports business and meat. The sales of meat was the best. In 2002, Japan Ham Group has 433 sales offices, 185 stores, 96 the factories, following farms, service branches etc. The scandal happened in all offices and stores. In a separate building, basically there was only one manager and more than 20 employees. The quality control was largely depended on the manager. Also, the information about the offices and stores couldn’t go up to the headquarters. In addition, there was little communication and interaction between the departments. Under that system, the employees worked in the same offices since joined. Furthermore, severe sales competition existed between offices and