Food safety watchdog the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) on Wednesday said it had not given any clean chit to Nestle’s banned Maggi noodles even as it rubbished all-clear reports from two of its own empanelled labs, saying there were lapses in the tests.
The FSSAI, in a rare press statement, rejected the findings of the Food & Drugs Laboratory of Goa as well as CFTRI, Mysuru, over test discrepancies.
It also cast doubts over the clean chit to Maggi noodles by U.K. and Singapore labs saying the Swiss food giant has not shared details of foreign test reports.
Rubbishing tests done by the Goa lab, the food regulator said food analysts at the lab had “wrongly taken the permissible limit of lead as 10 parts per million as against the actual maximum permissible level of 2.5 ppm“.
On the report of the CFTRI on the same sample, FSSAI said the Mysuru lab had not tested the noodles for the banned MSG.
“It is clarified in the first instance that FSSAI has not given any clean chit regarding the safety of Maggi noodles,” it said in the statement that followed reports that the Goa and Mysuru labs had found Maggi samples safe.
The FSSAI said the samples tested by labs at Goa and subsequently in Mysuru were primarily drawn from Nestle’s Bicholim factory in Goa, which manufactures the noodles largely for exports to eight countries.
“In any case, the test results of Goa samples had no bearing on the order dated 5th June, 2015 as the samples tested in Goa were not assumed to be unsafe while passing the recall order by FSSAI. As such, the present test reports do not have any bearing on that order,” it said.
