‘Highway robbery’: Checkers withdraws braai packs as customers complain of more sauce than chicken

The grocery retailer revealed that it plans to make full ingredient lists available to online shoppers on all its private-label ranges “to ensure greater transparency”.

• Customers who bought a Checkers’ private-label “ready to braai” chicken product have complained that it contained more sauce than chicken.
• One X user asked why the retailer would “rip people off like this”, while another described it as “highway robbery”.
• In line with SA food labelling rules, the pack lists the chicken content as 62%, but the complainants say their packs had less than that. Checkers has since withdrawn the product from sale.
• For more financial news, go to News24 Business. 

Food manufacturers can’t get away with positioning a premium ingredient as the “hero” in a product description and then failing to disclose that there is only a small amount of it in the recipe.

So if you buy a fruit juice with the word “cranberry” in large letters, with images of cranberries on the pack, the percentage of cranberry juice in the mix must be disclosed.

That usually appears in small print on the back of the pack and is often a smaller percentage than consumers assume.

In the case of Checkers’ own-brand 500g Ready to Braai Smokey Stuffed Chicken Breast, a woman who calls herself @cooklet on X ordered the product on Sixty60 – and said she knew, when opening the pack, that it contained more sauce than chicken.

She separated the chicken breasts from the “jalapeno cream cheese, smokey [sic] bacon and sweet BBQ” sauce and weighed each component separately. The scale confirmed her suspicions: 246g of chicken – 49%, including stuffing – and 264g of sauce.

“Why would you rip people off like this?” she posted. “I think it might also be illegal for you to not stipulate that more than 50% of the stated weight is liquid marinade…”

The small print on the back of the pack claims the product contains 62% chicken breast.

That declaration is referred to in South Africa’s food regulations as QUID (quantitative ingredient declaration). If a food label places “special emphasis” on the presence of one or more valuable or characterising ingredients – either in words, images or graphics – “the ingoing percentage of that ingredient must be declared”.

Because @cooklet bought the product online, she was unable to see the QUID before buying the product. Even if she had, it would have been misleading.

“The product description looked good [on the Sixty60 app], so I had no idea that I’d be getting something so disappointing and rage-inducing,” she said.

“If I had seen it in-store, I definitely wouldn’t have purchased it.”

Altus Strydom bought the product from Checkers in the Blueberry shopping centre, Honeydew. In his case, the chicken weighed slightly more – but still only about 50% of the total product weight.

“This is highway robbery,” he said.

Responding, the Shoprite group said the smoky chicken product had since been “deranged”, or withdrawn from sale: “Our supplier has conducted a comprehensive internal investigation, [which] identified a production processing error at the manufacturing facility.”

Asked how many packs were affected, Shoprite said: “Due to the manual process involved in the manufacturing of this product – cutting and portioning of chicken – smaller chicken portions were accidentally included.

“As this did not affect the entire batch, we are unable to confirm the exact number of units impacted.”

Corrective measures have since been implemented to strengthen quality controls and prevent it from happening again, Shoprite said.

The grocery retailer also revealed that it was working on making full ingredient lists available to online shoppers on all its private-label ranges “to ensure greater transparency”.

To compensate for not being able to handle products before buying them online, customers who are not fully satisfied with an item purchased on Sixty60 can log a claim directly through the app and receive an instant refund, either into their bank account or as app credit for future orders.