‘Lump test' leaves food giants in the soup

Multi-national food firms are battling to protect their sauces from EU rules which discriminate against anything which fails to pass a little-known European ‘‘lump test’’.

Any tinned sauce deemed to contain more than 20% lumps is not classified by Eurocrats as a sauce at all - but as a vegetable.

The difference - determined by putting the sauce through a sieve with a strictly-controlled mesh size - is crucial because vegetables face import and export tariffs up to 10 times as high as those imposed on sauces.

And with more and more consumers preferring sauces containing lumps of food - ‘‘textural interest’’ in the food trade jargon - producers say their business costs are soaring.

About €193.5m worth of sauces are imported into the EU every year, and about €225.8m worth exported - and about half the trade is attracting huge ‘‘vegetable’’ tariffs instead of low ‘‘sauce’’ tariffs.

Now, as EU officials try to appease the sauce makers by raising the lump threshold to let more sauces through as low-tariff sauces instead of high-tariff vegetables, pressure is mounting to abolish the distinction altogether.

The lump test, carried out compulsorily on every new sauce variety which comes on the market, has already been given the thumbs down by the World Customs Organisation, following a complaint from food giant Unilever.

But the only concession under consideration by the European Commission is to extend the classification of sauces to all those which contain up to one third lumps.

The decision, affecting firms like Unilever, Mars, Nestle and Heinz, will be taken later this week by the ‘‘Nomenclature’’ sub-committee of the EU’s Customs Code Committee.

It is due meet to amend a 1997 EU rule which states: ‘‘The expression ‘sauce’ does not cover a preparation of vegetables, fruit, or other edible plants if the percentage of those ingredients passing through a metal wire sieve with an aperture of five millimetres, is, after rinsing in water of a temperature of 20 degrees centigrade, less than 80% by weight calculated on the original preparation’’.

In other words a lump content of no more than 20% is allowed - but now that could rise to 33%.

Not good enough, say food industry officials - because the consumer trend is towards lumpier and lumpier sauces, full of ‘‘textural interest and a fresh, natural appearance’’. Overall, sales of sauces - pasta sauces, chicken sauces and a wide range of sauces for children - are rising by 15% a year.

And those that are deemed by the EU experts to be a vegetable and not a sauce face tariffs of as much as 288% - nearly three times the price of the product - when exporting to the many countries that copy EU customs rules.

The equivalent tariff for sauces is just 20%.