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Company stops re-sale of outdated food products
By Chris Kamalendran
A leading food products manufacturing company on Friday decided to stop disposing of its outdated products for use in piggeries or as manure after it was detected that such products had been illegally put into the market.

General Manager (Marketing) of Cargills, Mohan de Silva told The Sunday Times that following the detection of a quantity of its sausages and meatballs in a few shops in the Kadawata area it had decided to take action to prevent any of these products which are meant for disposal reaching the market.

He said an internal inquiry was on regarding the incident. The company took these measures after the Kadawata police, acting on a tip-off, raided six shops in the Kadawata, Kirillawala and Mawaramandiya areas and detected the outdated sausages and meatballs along with the other stocks.

OIC (Crimes Division) IP Lawrence Silva told The Sunday Times the police had been informed that a owner of a piggery was supplying the market with outdated meat products. 'We first arrested the suspect and his helper who gave the information about the shops to which he had supplied the products', IP Silva said.

He claimed that he had 'purchased' the products from the company for his piggery. The claim has not been established so far. Soon after the detection PHIs and medical officers from the Kelaniya, Mahara and Biyagama areas carried out an inspection of the products and found that the expiry dates of some of the food items were marked as March. Seals on some of the packets had been tampered with.

They carried out more searches on super markets and shops selling frozen food products to check whether products of other brands on which the expiry dates had lapsed were in the market. Mr de Silva said that in future the company will be taking steps to dispose of the frozen foods on which the expiry dates had lapsed or which are not fit for consumption.

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