Last week we welcomed Sainsbury’s group commercial director Mike Coupe as The Grocer’s latest guest editor. With the horsemeat scandal raging, and prime minister David Cameron calling on supermarkets to stand up and be counted, the timing could not have been better, as he provided us with some invaluable insight into how we should cover the story, and also offered up the sort of timely and upstanding response the PM was calling for, in his leader.

Coupe was insistent that Sainsbury’s would not seek to gain any commercial advantage in what was, he said, an industry issue. “Trust in the industry has been greatly impacted. This is an issue upon which longstanding battlelines need to be redrawn. Ultimately we will be judged by our collective and swift action. Speed and transparency should be our watchwords. Events are still unfolding, but we and our regulatory bodies need to proceed calmly but swiftly to get to the bottom of this.”

Stirring stuff.

Coupe was also an incredibly good sport in his stint as our guest editor. For his lunch, I cooked eight beef lasagnes, including a Sainsbury’s Basics frozen lasagne (76p) and a Tesco Everyday Value frozen lasagne (88p), all the way up to some upmarket chilled Taste the Difference and Finest lasagnes (£3.50). I won’t tell you which one he preferred, or which one he liked the least. That would be to betray his trust.

But as we now know, with an Asda Chosen by You Bolognese sauce, supplied by Greencore, drawn into the horsemeat scandal, Coupe is right to call for a collective response across brands, foodservice and government. And while the majority of products implicated so far have been at the value end of the spectrum, as he says, this is not simply an issue of individual products, individual suppliers or indeed individual retailers. No product is safe from the fraud that has been perpetrated within the European supply chain (follow the trail), with composite products - from frozen lasagnes and beefburgers to upmarket pates and salamis - potentially vulnerable.

So, how collective has the response from retailers been this weekend? Er, not very. Waitrose MD Mark Price clearly painted the horsemeat scandal as a budget meat issue in this weekend’s papers. And prior to the FSA press conference on Friday, all the supermarkets bar Asda had jumped the gun by issuing statements on the findings. Nor did their announcements strike me as particularly transparent. As well as jumping the gun, the announcements on Friday were notable for their stated absence of horsemeat in tests, even for those retailers previously implicated in the scandal in one shape or form. The only retailer to even reference a discovery of horsemeat was Iceland, which included the discovery in an asterisk in which it refuted the allegations. And as we now know, Malcolm Walker has gone on to vent a great deal of spleen on the topic, unequivocally blaming the food service industry for the scandal.

We’ll be asking PR experts to assess the retailer pronouncements in this weekend’s issue of The Grocer.

In the meantime, back to my lunch with Mike Coupe. The taste test was informative on two further levels. From both our blind tasting, and reading the labels, it was notable how much variation there was in terms of taste and texture. None of the eight lasagnes tasted the same. And some were delicious. I am also satisfied that all were safe to eat. We’ve both lived to tell the tale (or tail) anyway.

But one in particular was truly rank. The label said it contained 15% beef. And I have to assume, based on its continuing availability, that it is not under suspicion. Based on its taste, and odour, however, I won’t be making too many enquiries about which part of the cow it came from. Or buying it again for that matter.

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