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Antibiotics

Antibiotics

We have a strict and wide reaching antibiotics policy that ensures the health and safety of our livestock, farmers and customers 

Our Approach

Animal and bird welfare is important for our business, our customers, and for the farms we work with. That’s why on occasion and after scientific diagnosis, vets working with our supplying farms may need to prescribe antibiotics to livestock to treat certain health conditions. However, post treatment farmers must observe strict withdrawal periods for any animal or bird who may have received an antibiotic treatment. 

To help keep antibiotics effective for the human population, we have an active programme of responsible use in place. We buy directly from over 2,700 farmers and work closely with farming groups and vets to maintain the momentum of reducing antibiotic use on farms

We work in partnership with a number of strategic bodies across the industry to support the responsible use of Antibiotics in Agriculture. We are members of the BRC’s working group on AMR, the IGD’s Strategic Steering Group for Antibiotic Use in the food supply chain and the Food Industry Initiative on Antimicrobials (FIIA) as well as supporters of RUMA, the NFU, NPA and AHDB.

Antibiotics used as animal growth promoters are strictly forbidden on any farms supplying Morrisons products.Farms which supply our other fresh meat, fish, dairy and eggs are required to only use critically important antibiotics (as defined by the European Medicines Alliance) as a last resort, if at all.
No pork in our own-brand fresh supply chain is treated with any antibiotics critically important to human health.
Colistin is prohibited in all our fresh meat and dairy products.

Read more about our antibiotics policy here

Our Actions 

  • We have a robust methodology in place to monitor the use of antibiotics in our fresh poultry, dairy and egg supply chain
  • We work with our farmers, vets and universities to help develop monitoring tools for the UK pork, beef and sheep sectors, which have a wide variety of farm-based IT systems, reducing the need for antibiotics in the first place
  • We ask all farms supplying Morrisons with meat, dairy and eggs to report their antibiotic use for anonymous benchmarking
  • 100% of our fresh supply chain measures its use of antibiotics as part of the Red Tractor Standard
  • We share our best practice through our farming groups, farming website and ‘Farming Matters’ magazine