Wowprime Corp (王品集團) chairman Steve Day (戴勝益) yesterday said the recent food safety scandals in Taiwan have dragged down the company’s sales for the past three months 10 to 15 percent lower than its normal performance during the period.
Still, compared with its peers, Wowprime — which operates 15 restaurant chains with 407 outlets in Taiwan, China and Singapore — has been lucky enough to see its business fare relatively well in the January-to-September period, with consolidated sales totaling NT$13.5 billion (US$428.06), up 12.1 percent from a year earlier, company statistics show.
The string of cooking oil debacles have hit the nation’s food and beverage sector hard, with Wowprime one of those directly affected after its products were found to have contained animal-feed-grade oil made by manufacturing plants operated by the Ting Hsin International Group (頂新國際集團), which is at the heart of the scandal.
Warning: Excessive consumption of alcohol can damage your health.
Photo: CNA
Following the discovery of the inferior oil in Wowprime products, Day last week proposed mobilizing 10,000 of the firm’s employees to take to the streets to demand compensation from Ting Hsin. However, this idea met with strong criticism from netizens, causing Wowprime to drop the plan at the last minute.
“I feel ashamed and unable to show my face to you guys [on the food safety issue] ... I deserved a ‘goose egg’ for my bad crisis management,” Day told a media briefing during the group’s annual Wowprime tray-carrying contest.
He also called on the government to impose a heavy penalty on upstream oil manufacturers who made problematic oils, saying long-term imprisonment would be far more effective than fines in protecting small downstream eateries and restaurants.
In other news, the Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said that a new policy requiring manufacturers to separate their food production lines from non-food manufacturing facilities has taken effect.
The ministry said the new policy only applies with immediate effect to food manufactures that wish to establish new plants. Existing factories have a grace period of one year to separate their food and non-food production facilities to fulfill the requirements set by the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法).
So far, about 300 food manufactures in Taiwan have two or more different kinds of factories on the same site. After the one-year grace period, the government will order manufacturers to choose between operating one factory or the other if they still fail to separate food-making facilities from those producing non-food items, the ministry said.
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