An Indian court Thursday ordered regulators to retest samples of Nestlé SA’s instant noodles after a scare over the safety of the product forced a nationwide recall and said the company could resume sales if they were found safe.
India’s federal food-safety watchdog banned Nestlé’s Maggi 2-Minute Noodles in June after it said tests found lead levels above permissible limits, making the product “unsafe and hazardous.” Nestlé disputed the findings and took regulators to court, alleging the results were inaccurate.
When judges at the Bombay High Court handed down their ruling on Thursday, they raised doubts over the testing capabilities and capacity of Indian regulators. They selected three federal-government labs and said they should carry out fresh tests. Regulators were given six weeks to submit their results.
“Principles of natural justice weren’t followed” in imposing a ban on the noodles, Justice V.M. Kanade told a packed courtroom. He said Nestlé wasn’t given adequate advance notice of the ban.
Yudhvir Singh Malik, the chief of India’s Food Safety and Standards Authority, declined to comment, saying he had not yet received a copy of the court’s order.
In a statement Thursday, Nestlé said it “respects” the court’s decision and “will comply with the order to undertake fresh tests.” It said it hoped to have its noodles “back on the shelves as soon as possible.”
Lawyers for Nestlé, which has said it lost $50 million in sales because of the recall, had argued in court that “the standard of testing which was done by the authority wasn’t reliable and therefore on the basis of such analysis, a drastic order of banning the entire product was completely arbitrary.”
In a separate action, India’s federal government demanded roughly $100 million in damages from Nestlé this week, accusing the company of “gross negligence, apathy and callousness,” in a complaint filed with the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission. Nestlé denies the allegations. That complaint could be undermined if fresh tests clear the noodles.
Nestlé’s Indian arm, which started pulling Maggi noodles from stores just before they were banned, last month posted its first quarterly loss in decades. One in every five dollars the company earned in India before the food scare came from the sale of the noodles.
Doubts over the Indian test results were fueled by findings of regulators in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Singapore, which also checked noodles from Nestlé’s Indian arm and concluded they were safe to eat. Nestlé says its own tests had found lead levels to be within regulatory limits.
Indian food-safety officials in interviews have complained that their agencies areunderfunded and short-staffed. Few state governments have the equipment and expertise to test for toxic metals like lead. In Delhi, the national capital, which is home to 18 million people, the food-watchdog agency has just three chemists.
Government statistics show nearly 7,500 people died from ingesting contaminated food last year—most from pesticide and insecticide poisoning. While the toll has reduced in recent years, that translates to roughly one death an hour from tainted food.
Indian authorities checked about 70,000 food samples in the 12 months ended March 31, 2014, the latest period for which full-year figures are available. Most of those checks were done after consumer complaints and 13,000 samples were found to be adulterated or have other flaws.
Source: WSJ
