Tesco has been rebuked by the Advertising Standards Authority over assertions made by the Supermarket in the wake of the horsemeat scandal.

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In a ruling on Wednesday, ASA judged aspects of Tesco's public apology pieces, full-page adverts which ran in a number of national newspapers, to have been misleading. Tesco's corporate mea culpa, titled "What burgers have taught us", suggested the horsemeat scandal affected "the whole food industry."

However, the advertising authority ruled that the scandal, which began in January when meat processers supplying Tesco and a number of smaller supermarkets were found to have distributed burgers labelled as beef but containing high levels of horsemeat to stores in the UK and Ireland, in fact only affected certain players within the supply chain, using similar distribution models.

Once the Irish Food Safety Authority discovered horsemeat in burgers in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the issue snowballed and contamination was discovered on a massive scale, implicating local authority and prison caterers as well as supermarkets.

According to ASA, two complainants, one of whom is an independent butcher, challenged the claims made in Tesco's ad. The complainants said the company had "Implied there were issues with meat standards across the whole food industry… and unfairly denigrated food suppliers who had not been implicated in the supply of mislabelled meat products."

Responding to the complaint, Tesco said it had published the ad to show it was taking the Horsemeat scandal seriously. At the time, the scandal had developed into a food crisis, with sales of processed meats plummeting and an EU-wide investigation aimed at establishing the full extent of the mislabelling.

The company added that its ad contained no reference to any other producer, retailer or supplier and that it had not attempted to shift or share the blame for the issues it faced as a result of the scandal.

On Wednesday, ASA found Tesco's advert to have been misleading in that it appeared to cast doubt on the entire food industry, when only certain groups were found to have been involved in supplying or selling contaminated meat products. However, as Tesco did not reference other retailers or businesses, the Authority judged that it had not denigrated food suppliers who were not implicated in the scandal.