Lidl performed worst of the nine supermarket chains examined by the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, a pressure group made up of several NGOs.

Lidl had no publicly available policy on the use of antibiotics in its farm supply chain, leaving consumers in the dark and with no publicly available evidence of any effort to curb the overuse of antibiotics of concern.

The supermarket told the Guardian it had been working on a policy, which would soon be published. The policy it sent to the Guardian is four sentences long and “encourages producers to optimise welfare, health, hygiene, husbandry and biosecurity” of their animals, using antibiotics “as little as possible and as much as necessary,” without containing any specifics on how this can be achieved or measured.

The overuse of antibiotics on farms is a major cause of the growing resistance in humans that is giving rise to superbugs, bacteria impervious to all but the strongest medicines and which pose a huge and growing threat to human health.

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