MADURAI
With just four days to go for Deepavali and the sale of sweets, savouries and bakery products witnessing a spike, the Tamil Nadu Food Safety and Drugs Control department has intensified raids on food manufacturing units.
At least two food manufacturing units and three godowns supplying broken and spoilt eggs to hotels and bakeries had been closed down by officials since Thursday.
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M. Somasundaram, Designated Officer, Food Safety, said that the revelation during the recent raids was the network of suppliers and manufacturing units that sell and use broken or spoilt eggs.
“Yesterday, we raided a bakery products and snacks manufacturing unit on Melakkal main road in Kochadai. We found hundreds of trays of foul-smelling broken eggs,” he said. Based on the enquiry conducted at the unit, the officials had managed to raid at least three godowns and a number of hotels and food manufacturing units that use broken eggs.
“These manufacturing units are huge and often supply sweets, snacks and bakery products to a large number of shops across Madurai and even neighbouring districts,” he said. Another unit closed down on Thursday was found to be using prohibited colouring agents in cakes, sweets and savories.
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Officials have asked the public to generally avoid any food item sold with rich colouring agents.
“A variety of azo dyes like Tartrazine yellow is used, which could lead to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and renal failure,” Dr. Somasundaram said.
Another senior official from the department said that though the government allowed the use of certain permitted colouring agents not exceeding the limit of 100 parts per million, most of the manufacturing units exceeded this limit and there was no efficient and readily available mechanism to check this.
In the last five to six weeks, officials in Madurai have also closed down two oil manufacturing units, two ghee units and a flour unit for adulteration.