Europe 1 with AFP 10:45 a.m., August 30, 2022

For the past few days, biscuits from the Mikado, Petit Écolier, Granola, Pépito and Pim's brands have been missing from the shelves due to a salmonella alert in a factory of the chocolate supplier of the Mondelez group.

No product recall has been announced and the FASFC assures "that no contaminated product has ended up in the food chain".

The chocolate biscuits of the brands Mikado, Petit Écolier, Granola, Pépito or even Pim's are missing from the shelves because of a salmonella alert in one of the factories of the chocolate supplier of the Mondelez group.

But "no contaminated product has found its way into the food chain and there has therefore been no product recall", the Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain (AFSCA) told AFP.

On June 27, traces of salmonella were discovered in a batch from the Barry Callebaut factory in Wieze, about thirty kilometers from Brussels.

The group had quickly stopped production and contacted its customers one by one to ensure that contaminated chocolate did not reach consumers.

Six weeks of production shutdown

Among its customers, the American agrifood giant Mondelez International, which has had to "limit the shelf availability of several ranges of biscuits for a few weeks (mainly Mikado, Petit Ecolier, Granola, Pépito, Pim's)", details-t- it in a press release on Monday.

The Wieze plant, which is Barry Callebaut's largest in the world, contributes around 15% of its production, calculated Daniel Bürki, analyst at the Cantonal Bank of Zurich.

Chocolate production at the Belgian factory began to resume in early August, after a six-week shutdown, with three lines out of 24 restarted, but cleaning operations continued on other lines.

"The delivery of chocolate masses (...) with the specifications necessary for the manufacture of our biscuits has not yet returned to normal, which is currently delaying the production of certain references and thus causing them to be out of stock. “, explains Mondelez International.

Avoiding the Kinder Scandal

Based in Zurich, the world's number one cocoa and chocolate preparations immediately halted production and blocked all products produced after June 25, avoiding the Kinder disaster scenario.

Since the beginning of April, more than 3,000 tonnes of Kinder products have been withdrawn from the market in France, where 81 cases of salmonellosis have been detected, mainly in children under ten years old.

Suspected of having been slow to react to a problem identified in December, Ferrero is the target of several legal investigations.

It is "the biggest product recall of the past twenty years", admitted Ferrero's general manager France in an interview with Le Parisien at the end of May, during which he announced economic losses of around "several tens of millions of euros. ".

Barry Callebaut, which also supplies Unilever and Nestlé, expects a "significant" impact of the temporary shutdown of its Belgian factory on its results for the last quarter.