Cadbury Defends Safety of Its Products
AP) - LONDON-British confectioner Cadbury Schweppes PLC defended the safety of its products despite the recall of 1 million chocolate bars after finding traces of salmonella contamination.Britain’s food standards regulator said it was investigating why the company did not tell authorities earlier about a contamination incident at one of its factories in January.
Cadbury announced Friday that it was recalling about 1 million chocolate bars - including varieties of the popular Dairy Milk bar - in Britain and Ireland after finding traces of salmonella bacteria.
Cadbury said a batch of chocolate was contaminated with waste water from a leaking pipe at its factory in Marlbrook, western England, in January.
Cadbury managing director Simon Baldry said tests found only “minute traces” of bacteria.
“Our products were perfectly safe. We’d gone through our rigorous testing process,” Baldry told British Broadcasting Corp. television.
The company said it had rectified the problem and was withdrawing the products “purely as a precautionary measure.”
Cadbury is the world’s largest confectionary company, and includes brands like Trident, Halls, Dr Pepper, Snapple, Cadbury, Schweppes and Dentyne.
The Food Standards Agency said on Sunday Cadbury did not tell authorities about the contamination until this week.
“We were told on Monday that there was a problem occurring in January and that problem has gone on for a number of weeks before being corrected. We would have expected them to tell us,” an agency spokesman said on condition of anonymity in accordance with the agency’s practice.
He said any trace of salmonella in ready-to-eat foods was “not acceptable.”
The company said there was no proven link between its products and a rise in the number of cases of poisoning from a rare strain of salmonella. The bug causes diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps and in some cases requires hospital treatment.
The Health Protection Agency said it was too early to say whether there was a link between the chocolate and an outbreak of 45 cases of the rare montevideo strain of salmonella over the last four months.
Hugh Pennington, a bacteriologist at Aberdeen University in Scotland, said even tiny amounts of salmonella in chocolate could cause illness.
“The fat in chocolate actually preserves the salmonella from the normal intestinal defenses, so you don’t have to eat very many salmonellas to get infected,” Pennington told the BBC. “It’s about a thousand times less than if you’re eating it from traditional sources like meats.”