Food operators told to discontinue stapled tea bags

Use of stapler pins in tea bags poses potential hazard to consumers since loose staple consumed inadvertently with tea may cause serious health hazard, says FSSAI

Hyderabad: Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), on Tuesday, issued an order directing food business operators to discontinue manufacture, storage, distribution and sale of stapled tea bags by end of this June.

The use of stapler pins in tea bags poses potential hazard to consumers since loose staple consumed inadvertently with tea may cause serious health hazard, the FSSAI said. The regulatory body has also urged the State Food Safety Commissioner to take action to prevent use of unsafe packaging materials by companies and take up measures to enforce its order.

Earlier, several food business operators had approached the FSSAI and raised the issue of cost involved in changing over to staple-less machines and presence of very few manufactures of such machines globally.

The food business associations had maintained that existing technology used for tea bags through staple pins was widely prevalent in the country. The associations said that it would take a lot of time to migrate from existing technology to another for manufacturing tea bags.

The FSSAI has also directed the local tea bag manufacturing units to submit their plan to migrate or change over to new system by procuring the new machines or modifying the existing machines.