The country's top food safety expert, Prof Patrick Wall, has warned that currently food is "too cheap" and rock bottom prices bring associated food safety risks.
Prof Wall, who is chairman of the European Food Safety Authority, warned that what he termed "the relentless power of the multiples" would eventually affect standards.
"They will have to pay for both the product and the reassurance that 'Rolls Royce' traceability brings them," said Prof Wall who headed the first Food Safety Authority of Ireland.
He told the Northern Ireland Poultry Association that the industry was very much at the mercy of the "big five multiples" operating here.
"Consumers, too, need to realise that rock bottom prices bring an associated risk and that currently food is too cheap. The public must face the fact that if we are to have an indigenous poultry industry, the producers will have to be able to recover their costs and achieve a reasonable profit margin.
"Every food company is in the health business but recent scandals in Britain associated with the relabelling of intensively produced eggs as free range, and imported eggs contaminated with salmonella, highlight that there can be no room for complacency," Prof Wall said.
"Consumer confidence is a fragile thing and reputations and brands that take years to build can be seriously damaged overnight by being associated with adverse health effects or food scares."
However, the main theme of his paper was a call for an all-island approach to food safety and marketing and he said in the new political climate there would never be a more opportune time.
Prof Wall said financial support could become available to establish state-of-the-art disease surveillance across the entire island so that we could prove that we have healthy flocks and safe product.
"Ireland attempts to market itself as the little green isle at the edge of Europe, unspoilt and unpolluted, and with this imagery it could become not only the bread basket of Europe but, with the bio-security that our island status could give us, Ireland could become a source of disease-free livestock for other member states."