A Thai restaurant yesterday rebutted a report by the Consumers’ Foundation that it uses bone-in US beef and asked the foundation to issue a correction within three days or the restaurant may “take other actions” to defend its name.
“The Consumers’ Foundation said that we use bone-in US beef, but we don’t. We use boneless US beef,” Tsai Ping-cheng (蔡秉錚), operations manager of Very Thai (非常泰), a restaurant chain with three branches in Taipei, told a press conference.
He also showed a certificate of origin for the beef products they use.
The foundation said on Thursday that it had surveyed 50 restaurants around the country and found that 26 of them, or 52 percent, did not display information at their entrances and on the menu about the origin of the beef they serve.
Twelve restaurants served US beef to customers, but did not disclose information about the origin of the meat, it said.
The foundation singled out two restaurants — Very Thai and Yayan Japanese Yakiniku Restaurant (野宴) — which it said served bone-in US beef, but did not disclose this information to customers.
Yayan immediately released a statement saying all the beef products it uses are imported from New Zealand, and posted a statement on its Web site saying it does not use any beef products from the US.
“There was something wrong with the Consumers’ Foundation’s survey, because their survey volunteers came to one of our restaurants and asked the manager whether we use bone-in beef from the US, and the manager answered ‘no,’” Tsai said.
Tsai said the restaurant had tried to contact the foundation afterwards, but it did not respond.
“We therefore asked the Consumers’ Foundation to issue half-page correction ads in the nation’s four major newspapers, and correct the information published on their Web site,” Tsai told the news conference. “If the foundation fails to respond to our request positively, we would not rule out taking other action to defend the restaurant’s name.”
Tsai conceded that the restaurant did not clearly mark the origin of the beef on the menu, but said they have already corrected this.
Consumers’ Foundation secretary-general Huang Yu-sheng (黃鈺生) said all the volunteers who took part in the survey had official documents from the foundation with five specific questions on them, hence, “there is no problem with our survey.”
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