McDonald’s and KFC in China faced a new food safety scare yesterday after a Shanghai television station reported a supplier sold them expired beef and chicken.
The companies said they immediately stopped using meat from Husi Food Co (福喜食品). Xinhua News Agency said authorities had ordered the supplier to suspend operations and were investigating.
Dragon TV said on Sunday that Husi, owned by OSI Group of Aurora, Illinois, repackaged stale beef and chicken and put new expiration dates on them. It said they were sold to McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut restaurants.
Photo: AFP
The report added to a series of food safety scares in China that have battered public confidence in dairies, fast-food outlets and other suppliers.
McDonald’s Corp and Yum Brands Inc, which owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, said in separate statements they were conducting their own investigations.
“Food safety is a top priority for McDonald’s,” the company said on its microblog account.
The company said it pursues “strict compliance” with consumer safety laws and regulations, and has “zero tolerance for illegal behavior.”
Telephone calls to the Shanghai office of the food and drug regulator were not answered.
A woman who answered the telephone at Husi’s headquarters said no one was available to comment.
Xinhua cited a company manager, Yang Liqun (楊立群), who said the company has a strict quality control system and will cooperate in the investigation.
KFC is China’s biggest restaurant chain, with more than 4,000 outlets and plans to open 700 more this year. The company was badly hurt after state television reported in December last year that some poultry suppliers violated rules on drug use in chickens.
Yum said KFC sales in China plunged 37 percent the following month. KFC launched an effort to tighten control over product quality and eliminated more than 1,000 small poultry producers from its supply network.
Scandal-weary consumers yesterday expressed mixed feelings.
Chen Lu, 24, an employee of an Internet company, was eating a chicken burger and fries at a McDonald’s in central Shanghai that was half-empty at midday, a time when most restaurants are crowded.
“My boyfriend called and told me not to eat McDonald’s one minute after I ordered this chicken hamburger, but what can I do? I’ve already ordered and I am in a hurry,” she said.
“I am worried about my health. I will try to avoid it, at least for a while. I am pretty disappointed in this brand,” Chen said.
Another diner, Liu Kun, a 24-year-old student from Nanjing who was visiting Shanghai, said that he was unconcerned.
“The incident won’t change me eating here,” Liu said. “There have been negative reports all the time, McDonald and KFC are the leaders in the industry.”
China has suffered a string of product scandals over the past decade in which infants, hospital patients and others have been killed by phony or adulterated milk powder, drugs and other goods.
Foreign fast-food brands are seen as more reliable than Chinese competitors, though local brands have made big improvements in quality. However, the high profile of foreign brands means any complaints involving them attract attention, while their status as foreign companies with less political influence means Chinese media can publicize their troubles more freely.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to