Ghee manufacturers, shops come under food safety lens

Trichy: The district food safety and drug administration department conducted a special inspection at the wholesale ghee shops and ghee manufacturing units in the city to check for adulteration recently.

Food safety officers stated that during inspection, they discovered a few packets where ghee was mixed with maida flour, semolina flour and oil. Ghee with such adulteration is generally sold for non-edible purposes and predominantly for lighting lamps.

But since a few such packets didn’t carry the information on whether the ghee was for edible or non-edible purposes, the food safety officials instructed the wholesale sellers to sell ghee packets, which had all the necessary details according to FSSAI norms.

A food safety officer, who had inspected around 70 wholesale shops and manufacturing units, said that he found two shops which sold ghee packets with no proper label. “Some of the packets which had adulterated ghee, did not have proper labelling apart from the brand name,” he stated.

Apart from having all the necessary details including the manufacturing date, expiry date, batch number, full name and the detail of the manufacturer, FSSAI registration number, the shop owners and manufacturing units have also been asked to mention if the ghee is for edible or non-edible purposes clearly in the packets. They were also instructed to make the necessary changes and failure of which would lead to the department taking an action against them.

We had also conducted an Information Education and Communication (IEC) campaign for ghee sellers to create an awareness of sorts,” the food safety officer added.

In fact this inspection was conducted a couple of weeks after district collector K Rajamani had issued an advisory to the general public on purchasing ghee.

He had stated that customers should refrain from purchasing ghee packets without all the necessary details mentioned in it. “People should not buy low quality ghee just because the price is less,” he stated in the advisory.

He further said that if the customers had any complaints, they could send an SMS or a WhatsApp message to the official food safety department’s complaints number 94440 42322.