Food safety testers Neogen say business has “rocketed” in the wake of the horsemeat scandal.

Distribution manager Rob Langley said Neogen had been swamped with requests by the food industry to test products for adulteration.

“Since the middle of January, the demand for testing has been unprecedented,” he said. “The lab is rammed at the moment with samples coming in, there is no end to them.

“Previously the tests we were doing for meat were minimal, for things like pork within non-pork products to make sure that it was safe for various religious groups to eat. Now it’s across the board and its for all different parts of the food chain.”

It was good news for the business to be so busy, he added, but only because horsemeat was not a “potentially lethal issue where people are dying, like E.coli”.

However, he refused to divulge if manufacturers were asking the lab to test for other unusual meat other than horse, saying it was “confidential information”.

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