The president of the Association for Children’s Health, made up of families of victims of milk contaminated with salmonella in 2017, pleads for more controls on manufacturers.
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Quentin Guillemain, president of the Association for Children’s Health, made up of families of victims of milk contaminated with salmonella in 2017, estimates this Saturday morning on franceinfo that“Companies cannot be trusted” implicated in the latest food scandals, such as Ferrero Where Buitoni. He judges them “outlaw” with respect to health regulations.
>> Buitoni pizzas, Kinder chocolates, cheeses… Five questions about food product recalls and controls
franceinfo: The Ferrero factory affected by suspicions of salmonella had to close: is this a sign of factory negligence?
Quentin Guillemain: This is a sign of poor hygiene, and that something has not been dealt with in time. With regard to the Ferrero plant, we realized that it already had salmonella in December 2021. We can clearly see that each time, on this type of plant, we are in situations that have lasted for already several weeks or even several months. It’s a sign that things weren’t done right when they should have been. We know that when this type of bacterium arrives in a production chain, the entire production chain must be dismantled, the factory shut down for a few weeks and the whole chain reassembled. This is probably not what was done in this factory.
Are the controls sufficient?
The regulations require manufacturers to control themselves, that is to say to be judge and party. Obviously, they cannot be trusted. We have scandals every month, every year, so we cannot continue with this type of regulation. There is also the DGCCRF [Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes] and controls by the Ministry of Agriculture. But in reality, there are not enough staff. More than 400 positions have been eliminated in a few years. Even though in 2017, at the time of the Lactalis affair, everyone was saying that the services responsible for these checks had to be strengthened, their capacity for action has been reduced, both in terms of resources and in human terms . When there are this type of checks, they are rarely unannounced, and the company is asked to provide documents. No control or analysis is carried out on site. This obviously leads to wanting to control what they want us to control.
Do the incriminated companies fear the controls, if they are rare?
We have factories that operated for months, years, in unsatisfactory and even deplorable hygienic conditions. This is proof that upstream, there has not been sufficient control work to make it possible to realize when the company is not playing the game. It is clear that this is the Buitoni affair or the Kinder affair, that we are faced with companies that have not complied with the regulations and are even outside the law. It is clear that these companies cannot be trusted. These are large groups, not small businesses. We talk about Nestlé, we talk about Ferrero. They have entire departments working on these issues. This is the proof that there is a failure somewhere.
Was the withdrawal of the products fast enough in your opinion?
I feel like I’m reliving what I went through in 2017 [avec Lactalis]. For a month, we had successive withdrawals from Lactalis. We see it today with the Kinder affair which started with products with expiration dates [spécifiques], then suddenly, all the products of the same series, then all the products of the same type. We realize that withdrawals-recalls are not adapted to the situation. We should have recalled all the products from the start. It was exactly the same thing in the context of the Lactalis cheese affair. We can clearly see that they recalled all the cheeses a few days after recalling a few batches. There is a reactivity that is not sufficient and these manufacturers obviously favor profitability, that is to say that they recall the minimum before recalling more widely. It’s a problem, because during this time people are consuming it.