Home-made meatballs usually use the real cuts of meat. However, for the sake of high efficiency, companies use discarded bits of chicken and pork to make meatballs. Kesko, the Finnish foodstuff giant, recently renamed its meatball product to 'pyorykoita' or simply 'balls' after it had been revealed that the product only contains scrap of meat.
According to Finnish law, the bits of meat or say 'scrap' do not come under the category of meat. Thus, numerous number of meatball manufacturers removed the prefix 'meat' from their product names.
The product research manager of Ruokakesko, the Kesko's food division, Ms. Rautpalo said that the Machine-recovered meat can not come under the category of meat. This is just mechanically separated from the fillet after the parts. She further said that some of the meatball's products have 0% meat content according to their own packaging yet the manufacturers claim to have chicken/pork meat in it. The packaged meatballs contain 52% of the meat according to the companies, however, according to Finnish law, 52% meat does not actually qualify as meat.
Use of less desirable parts of the animals is beneficial to the companies in increasing their efficiency and hence the profit and inflows. However, deceiving the public is something intolerable and should be stopped at once. Meatless balls can not be named as meatballs when they contain no meat at all. Thus, on last Monday, Ruokakesko renamed their product to 'balls' from 'meatballs' on its website.