Noodle producer Tiger Brand (虎牌) has been ordered to pull five of its products from the shelves before Monday after it was discovered that the Taiwanese company had falsified expiry dates and manufacturing locations, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said.
In a press release yesterday, the FDA said that a joint inspection with Yilan County and Taipei City health officials on Wednesday and Thursday found that five products from Taipei-based Tiger Brand Food Co (虎牌食品) and Yilan-based Tiger Brand Cheng Tung Industrial Co (虎牌正通) did not conform to labeling regulations.
One of them, Bean Threads (虎牌粉皮), was labeled on its ready-for-sale package as being manufactured in Vietnam, but China was printed as the location of manufacture on a bulk package, the FDA said.
As for the other four bean noodle products, the FDA said that their shelf life was stated as two years on the raw packaging, but as three years on other packaging.
“The five foodstuffs clearly defied the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) and must be pulled off the shelves nationwide by Monday midnight,” the food agency said.
Wang Ming-li (王明理), director of the food and drug division at Taipei’s Department of Health, said Tiger Brand claimed that it switched from Vietnam to China for imports of bean noodles in May 2013, after news reports alleging that Vietnam-made products were tainted with alum.
“The company said it continued to use old packaging from the time it was still purchasing bean noodles from Vietnam. It also admitted that it deliberately changed the expiry date from two years to three years, which started from the day they were repackaged,” Wang said.
Wang said dishonest labeling of place of origin carries a fine ranging from NT$40,000 to NT$4 million (US$1,278 to US$127,783).
The case has been referred to prosecutors, who are set to determine whether the act of falsifying expiry dates constitutes as fraud.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,