CB Bureau
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reportedly found pesticides in Haldiram’s products and categorically stated that their baked products were unfit for consumption, and also that these were adulterated and contained poisonous content. Among the rejected Haldiram’s products were some sugar candies and salty Indian snack mixes.
According to the USFDA website, it was in September 2014 that pesticides were discovered for the first time in Haldiram’s products. Since then, the US has refused to import their products 86 times.
In their defence, the Nagpur-based company said that their food was completely safe. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, a senior Haldiram’s official said, ‘Our food is 100 per cent safe and complies with the law of the land. A pesticide that is permitted in India may not be allowed there. And even if it is, they may not allow it in the same concentration as it is here.’
According to The Wall Street Journal report, US food-safety inspectors have labelled hundreds of made-in-India snacks unfit for sale in America as these have been found to have pesticides and bacteria in high levels. This year, most of the Indian snacks that were rejected by the FDA were from Haldiram’s. Describing a product from the western state of Gujarat, which the FDA identified only as ‘snack foods not elsewhere mentioned’, it said it blocked the import as it ‘appears to consist in whole or in part of a filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance or be otherwise unfit for food.’
The US food and drug regulator has in the past one year rejected more than 2,100 import batches of ‘made in India’ products across food, personal care and health supplement categories, including those made by leading companies such as Hindustan Unilever, Britannia, Nestle India, Haldiram’s, Heinz India and MTR Foods. As a matter of fact, data on the USFDA website show that it rejected more snack imports from India than from any other country in the first five months of 2015. More than half of all the snack products that were tested and then blocked from sale in the US this year were from India. Indian products led the world in snack rejects last year as well.
The reasons for rejection vary from labelling issues to products manufactured in unhygienic conditions, to pesticides being above permissible limits, according to data put out by the USFDA on its website. Most Indian companies say the items that have been rejected were shipped by unauthorised third-party importers. The companies say the items were made in plants that were not supposed to manufacture for the US market, and that in some cases they were even unaware that these batches had been denied entry.
Interestingly, an online search by CauseBecause for Haldiram’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy or practice yielded no results.