More than 3,000 tonnes of Kinder products have been pulled from the market over salmonella fears, leaving a hole of tens of millions of euros, a company executive told France’s Le Parisien daily on Thursday.
Nicolas Neykov, the CEO of Ferrero France, stated the contamination came “through a filter positioned in a vat for dairy butter” at a factory in Arlon, Belgium. He added that the contamination may have been produced by humans or raw materials.
Chocolate goods prepared at the facility in Arlon, southeastern Belgium, were found to have salmonella, resulting in 150 cases in nine European nations.
Eighty-one of these were in France, largely affecting children under 10 years old.
The factory’s shutdown and the health worries were blows to its owner, Italian confectionery company Ferrero, hitting at the height of the Easter holiday season when its Kinder candies are sought-after supermarket buys.
“This crisis is heartbreaking. It’s the biggest elimination of merchandise in the last 20 years, “Neykov added.
But the corporation anticipated being able to start up the production again, with 50 percent of health and safety checks to be carried out by an approved “external laboratory” in the future, instead of the prior method of exclusively internal assessments.
“We have asked for a reopening on June 13 to relaunch manufacturing as soon as feasible,” he continued.