WRITEBACK

RESPONDING TO the report ‘Soft drink to oil, state food monitors find 9 products of top firms ‘substandard’’ (April 17), a spokesperson for the Murugappa group has written saying “the article has referred to Parry Enterprises (part of the Murugappa Group) and their packaged drinking water, marketed in and around Chennai, in an erroneously misleading and poor light”.

The spokesperson said the probe “report referred” to “has been contested by Parry Enterprises and the product has been retested by FSSAI (Food Safety and Standards Authority of India) and has been certified as fully compliant by FSSAI”. The Indian Express responds: The report was based on an RTI response from Tamil Nadu’s food safety wing in Kanchipuram. On July 20, 2016, the Kanchipuram wing found aerobic microbial count in Parry Packaged drinking water at 32 colony forming units (CFU)/ML, which should have been below 20 CFU/ML as per rules.

In response to queries by this newspaper, the company stated it was “unable to refer to the probe report” as it had not “received this report” from the Kanchipuram food safety wing.

“However, we were made aware of a test report... by Kings Institute dated 20th July which was an enclosure to a letter from FSSAI dated 29th July 2016 on a matter relating to labelling. We understood that this observation made by the Test house was in itself inaccurate and based on inadequate and perfunctory analysis as per the Act. As a matter of abundant caution, we have produced all our internal test reports to FSSAI for their scrutiny. Accordingly, FSSAI authorities inspected our facility and drew samples for retesting at 2 laboratories, one of which included Kings Institute. The retesting was carried out by the laboratories in strict compliance of FSSAI test procedure and the product was found to be fully compliant to FSSAI standards. This clearly vindicated our stand that our product meets the specified standards and hence the initial test findings of Kings Institute stands expunged. This process was concluded in Jan/feb 2017,” the company stated.