Kuai Kuai Co Ltd (乖乖食品) yesterday pulled its Peacock Biscuits (孔雀餅乾) from store shelves after it was told by the Taipei City health department that traces of melamine were found in the products.
Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美), director of the Taipei health department’s food and drug division, said the results of the latest round of random tests came in yesterday, and that officials found one pack of Peacock Biscuits that contained 4.62 parts per million (ppm) of melamine.
All of the other 86 products in the random test — including other products by Kuai Kuai and Nabisco’s Oreo cookies — tested negative and were therefore not recalled, she said.
Chiang said the department has demanded that the company recall the crackers and destroy them under the supervision of the department.
Chiang said the company used powdered baking ammonia from Sesoda Corp, which had imported tainted ammonia from China. The powdered baking ammonia imported by Sesoda Corp was found to contain between 70ppm and 300ppm of melamine by the Department of Health (DOH) earlier this month.
Kuai Kuai assistant manager Ker Chih-hsiung (柯志雄) told a separate press conference yesterday that the company would follow the city government’s instructions and pull all the biscuits off the shelves.
Consumers who had purchased Peacock Biscuits could ask for refunds at stores, Ker said.
Ker also said that the company would return the product to store shelves when its safety has been assured.
The Bureau of Food Safety yesterday urged the public not to panic, saying that although the crackers used ammonium bicarbonate imported from China, the powder comprised less than 1 percent of their total volume.
The DOH said that it would continue to sample snack foods on the market to make sure that other products do not contain the problematic ammonium bicarbonate.
In the past weeks, melamine has been found in imports of dairy products, creamers and vegetable-based proteins from China.
The DOH does not allow foods that test positive for melamine using the LC-MS/MS technique (liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry) to remain on the market.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY STAFF WRITER
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