Bernard Matthews

Bernard Matthews’ workers were filmed playing baseball using live turkeys as a ball. Their punishment? Just 200 hours of community service.⁶

In 2016, a separate investigation of a free-range and RSPCA Assured turkey farm, operated by Bernard Matthews, revealed animals with bloodied and infected head wounds, with one dying bird having suffered such a severe head injury that his features could hardly be detected.⁷

In 2019, a community in Suffolk objected to the expansion of a Bernard Matthews’ farm, citing odours, traffic, noise, safety, and pollution concerns. The council nonetheless approved the expansion.⁸

The company’s importation of meat from Hungary is thought to have been behind a bird flu outbreak that decimated farmed birds in the UK. Bernard Matthews initially denied any possibility but was forced to concede after a Guardian investigation uncovered the link.⁹

In 2022, investigators filmed a cull of Bernard Matthews’ turkeys following yet another bird flu outbreak. This time, workers were filmed disregarding government regulations, dropping dead birds on the ground and kicking them, allowing their feathers to be carried away on the wind, potentially taking the virus with them.¹⁰ Bird flu can infect people, causing fatalities, and is described as a “major threat to humans”.¹¹

After years of appalling press, Bernard Matthews forked out £3 million to an agency to help restore its reputation.¹² That was £3 million they may as well have set fire to given what came next: Boparan Junior’s multiple jailings, workers being injured and killed, and others falsifying health and safety data.

Bernard Matthews stands accused of using misleading imagery of happy animals on its packaging¹³ in direct contrast to what investigations at their actual farms reveal.¹⁴

Bernard Matthews’ farms produce a mind-boggling 377 tonnes of poultry waste per day but they have no publicly available plan or strategy for how they dispose of it.¹⁵ And this is not a company that you would instinctively trust to do the responsible thing.

Jamie Oliver, alongside nutritionists, singled out Bernard Matthews’ Turkey Twizzlers as one of the worst foods to feed to children. The ultra-processed product contained just 34% turkey and was bulked up with water, pork fat, and a range of additives, sweeteners, and flavourings.¹⁶

In 2019, Bernard Matthews recalled its Turkey Dinosaurs after it was found they may be contaminated with small pieces of metal.¹⁷

And, keeping with the theme of harming kids’ health, in 2023, investigative journalists obtained footage of workers at Bernard Matthews falsifying vital health and safety checks on products aimed at children.¹⁸

We checked the most recent audit (Nov 2025) to see if Bernard Matthews’ slaughterhouse had cleaned up its act at all and, good news, it has! No, we’re kidding. Of course it hasn’t. There were 18 breaches of food safety and hygiene regulations, including two major problems: failing to carry out the required microbiological testing and, rather fundamentally, even the layout of the plant was found not to be conducive to good hygiene and contamination-prevention.¹⁹

Despite its possible role in the 2007 bird flu outbreak, it emerged that Bernard Matthews took £500,000 in compensation from taxpayers to mitigate the losses caused by that same outbreak. Did it pass on so much as a penny to all the workers it laid off? It did not.²⁰ Their pockets won’t line themselves, you know.

In 2015, a Bernard Matthews’ factory worker suffered such an enormous electric shock that his lawyers described both his shoulders being fractured and dislocated.²¹

In 2020, another worker was dragged into a machine at the company’s Suffolk processing plant and suffered severe muscle damage and a broken arm.²²

Just five months later, at the exact same plant, yet another worker was left permanently paralysed when he got dragged into a machine. As a result of harming these two people, Bernard Matthews was fined £400,000.²³

Unite, the workers' union, criticised the company’s billionaire owner for penny-pinching when the cost of the company-run buses for staff doubled during the Covid pandemic.²⁴

When asked what it’s like to work for Bernard Matthews, workers' responses included: "long hours with bad wage”, “there are no benefits apart from the pay”, and “in almost 15 years in this country, this is the worst place I ever worked at.”²⁵