The owner of Kaohsiung-based grocery store chain Mr. Fresh has been released on bail after being questioned by prosecutors last week on suspicion of relabeling and selling expired frozen food products.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office said it had launched an investigation after receiving a tip-off about the company, which has three branches in affluent areas of the city and specializes in imported food products.
Prosecutors and Kaohsiung Department of Health officials searched the store’s Gushan (鼓山) and Lingya (苓雅) branches on Tuesday, where they seized 184 expired products with altered expiration dates and 81 products with “questionable” expiration dates, it said.
Photo: Huang Liang-chieh, Taipei Times
Prosecutors also summoned five people for questioning, including company owner Chung Sheng-hsu (鍾昇旭) and a female store manager surnamed Huang (黃).
Prosecutors said that Chung and Huang routinely opened shipments of products with shelf lives of less than one year — including frozen croquettes, meats, fish and hot pot ingredients — and rewrapped them in vacuum-sealed bags.
Chung instructed employees to enter the products into the grocery’s point-of-sale system and print labels with an expiration date exactly one year from the day they went on sale, prosecutors said.
When products expired, employees were told to relabel them as “nearly expired products” so that they could still be sold, they said.
Prosecutors questioned Chung and Huang on suspicion of forgery, aggravated fraud and contraventions of the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法).
A Kaohsiung court later set Chung’s bail at NT$2 million (US$64,014) and Huang’s at NT$200,000, while three other Mr. Fresh employees who were questioned were released without bail.
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