Taipei City’s Department of Health will complete a citywide inspection of all salt on sale in shops within three weeks following news that industrial salt was being sold as food-grade salt.
The Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office on Wednesday launched an investigation into a company that had allegedly been repackaging industrial salt as food-grade salt and selling it on the market for more than three years.
The company, Huan Hai Co (環海), allegedly bought industrial salt from state-owned Taiyen for NT$3 per kilogram and resold it for a healthy profit.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City councilors including Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄) and Huang Hsiang-chun (黃向群) yesterday urged the Taipei City Government to take action to protect consumers and ensure the safety of salt on the market.
“This government leaves the people living under constant fear, with problems such as poisoned milk, bad oil at fast food chains and industrial salt. The city government should ensure food safety,” Chuang said at the Taipei City Council.
Chuang and Huang collected 23 kinds of food-grade salt sold on the market, and said it would be impossible for consumers to tell the quality of the various salts, the cost of which ranged from NT$15 to NT$200 per package.
Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美), director of the Taipei Health Department’s food and drug division, said the division would inspect all kinds of salt on the market, test them for heavy metals and publish the results in about three weeks.
Chiang said it would be difficult to spot the difference between industrial and food-grade salt.
Consumers should read the list of ingredients on the package as a safety monitoring measure, she said.
The division will investigate the responsibility of stores or importers whose salt is found to contain heavy metals, she said.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) yesterday said there was no evidence that salt sold on the market was contaminated with anything, appealing to the public not to panic.
“From a food safety angle, there are no safety concerns about the salt currently sold on the market,” said Chen Chao-yih (陳昭義), vice chairman of the MOEA State-owned Enterprise Commission.
Agencies including the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection and the Department of Health have not found a single case of contamination by harmful ingredients, he said.
The bureau will randomly check around 5 percent of imports of edible salt at customs, including those from China, while the health department checks on the edible salts available in stores and at hypermarkets.
Huang Lai-ho (黃來和), the bureau’s deputy director-general, said 151 batches totaling 11.2 million kilograms of edible salt had been imported from China so far this year, accounting for 70 percent of the country’s imported edible salt.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY JASON TAN
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