I doubt that Cadbury's is entirely to blame for the addition of shit to their foodstuff no matter how reprehensible we all find their conduct since January.
Once upon a time all products were -as far as it was possible, produced to the highest standards. That is how prepackaged foods got a market place over real foods. Real food, fresh food, required a long wheelbase from farm to city. Stuff perished and unscrupulous merchants got rid of it as best they could.
The alternative was to buy tinned and preserved stuff that was produced by people with great reputations.
I bet the fools responsible for the penny pinching are regretting things there at the moment. I hope they have to eat their shit.
Once upon a time people accepted that they loved in a world full of bugs that were out to get them.
Before they built sanitised little boxes full of plastics that gave them asthma, and peered out in horror at the ugly nasty world outside, through plastic net curtains, and only ate things full of chemicals that came in boxes with brightly coloured labels just like the toys they were brought up on.
Replacing the general thrill of living in a real world with the synthetic thrill of reading the tabloids and imagining the worst that could happen to them...
I haven't bought any Cadbury's chocolate for a long time. I found that any other chocolates that I ate, always tasted better. It must be all that milk that they put in (rather than cocoa solids).
I used to be very fond of Horlicks light malt drinking chocolate. Then one day I bought a carton of it which _didn't taste quite so good_. So I phoned the company, and was instructed to send the item back ( I received a stamped jiffy bag and a £5.00 voucher). To come to the point, I find that the product is still the same (inferior); and that if I add a small amount of pure cocoa per cup, that drink tastes better. I believe that the manufacter have reduced the cocoa content. It says 4% on the carton; which is only a small amount, after all. Can you believe that, or are my taste buds lying to me?
ISTR that the european chocolate makers tried to stop Cadburys calling their product "chocolate" because it has so little cocoa in it. If a bit of chocolate, at room temp, only quietly tears rather than a brittle break with with an audible snap it hasn't got enough cocoa in it.
Current favorite chocolates are Bendicks Bittermints, 95% cocoa solids chocolate. B-)
I liked Cadbury's chocolate (including Dairy Milk) before/until I tasted other brands. I preferred the taste of most of the others. Now, I find their chocolate more expensive than other brands of similar quality and less good to eat. Have you tried Lindt chocolate? If yes, and you prefer Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate, then there's something wrong with your taste buds. Lindt milk chocolate is _delicious_. BTW, I don't eat a lot of chocolate.
Made just down the road from me, people who work there tend not to eat the product. But then again, anyone I have met who has ever worked in a food factory tends to refuse to eat the product.
Cadbury have however hit a new all time low AFAIC. Having a factory in which a sewage pipe crosses a food manufacturing line is bad enough to start with. Letting it leak is worse and then discovering a leak, the consequences of the leak and doing nothing is absolutely reprehensible.
When I was a lad there was a chocolate factory just across town. On your first day there you were told that you could eat anything and everything, as much as you liked. By the end of the first week even just the smell of chocolate was distasteful.
Evidence for that please? "Sewage" implies foul water from a toilet, rather than waste machine washing water. I've not seen any reference to "crossing" only running adjacent and splashes from drips reaching the line. Reported levels of contamination are extremely low as well. Figures commonly quoted are 0.3 cells/100g, the "alert" level is 10 cells/100g, with the level required to make you ill around 1,000,000 cells/100g.
I suspect that as the level detected was way below the "alert" level Cadbury didn't bother to tell the FSA but just quietly found and fixed the leak. The FSA spotted an increase in the number of cases involving this rare strain salmonella and started digging. Eventually finding the a lab that had some +ve results for samples from Cadbury. As they hadn't been told (no need, level so low...) the FSA then go "overboard" telling Cadbury to remove all products from the market place that might conceivably be contaminated, even though Cadbury have reported that only about 5,000 bars have any significant risk. The rest is pure media hype.
The question that should be asked, as there has been a rise in the number of cases, is: Is the general testing for and reporting of salmonella strict enough?
Personally we have a box of 60 Freddo Bars bought about a month ago. Many of which have been eaten with no ill effects what so ever. We aren't going to return 'em.
On Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:50:10 +0100 (BST), Dave Liquorice wrote: [snip]
Sewage implies foul water heading for the sewers from any source. Cadbury are being disingenuous (to the point of being lying bastards) simply referring to "a pipe". However to get the levels of contamination referred to from drips of water there must have been a high level of faecal material in the source. Remember salmonella spp will form a tiny part of the bacterial load of sewage and salmonella is sensitive to detergents and temperature and hence much less likely to have come from hand washing or machine washing waste water.
You can get picky about whether the pipe crossed a production line at right angles or ran parallel to it, but the fact is that for water to drop vertically from a pipe the pipe must be above the production line.
Only a f****it would regard contamination by salmonella as low or insignificant.
Yup, there's no doubt that they covered up. And that some marketing bod made the decision that a few million contaminated bars of chocolate wouldn't hurt Cadbury's image too much. It only came to light when an independent laboratory blew the whistle.
Untrue, the lab volunteered the information to the FSA, Cadbury did not.
The question is, what sort of disgusting bastard discovers salmonella and evidence of sewage contamination in a foodstuff and puts commerce ahead of common sense? We've not seen, and we should by now have seen the figures for faecal coliforms in this chocolate.
I can only hope that you like eating shit, and have eaten sufficient in the past that you don't have reason to fear either salmonella or coliforms.
It's amusing to see that you and others have swallowed (literally in your case) Cadbury's shit and are happy to accept these repetitions of the term "insignificant". FSA have acted correctly IMO, and Cadburys bullshit about increasing number of infections being the trigger rather than the fact that they knowingly sold contaminated food rather than lose some money, remains simply bullshit. I heard their spokesdroid on R4 this weekend and it was a masterpiece of spin designed to confuse the issue as much as possible.
They should be forced to come clean (ha!) and state openly that they sold shit-contaminated chocolate.
I once had a lecturer at Uni who did consultancy work for Cadbury (~10yrs agoi). He claimed that the hygene standards at their factory were pretty poor and that they didn't care too much. He claimed that they believed there was little risk because the fat and sugar content of the chocolate was so high that nothing could "breed" in the chocolate anyway. I'm not sure about the science behind that, but it's interesting considering recent events.
What blows me away is where he thought the contaminant that contaminated the water that contaminated the chocolate was coming from.
I would expect that water used to wash machines used in the production of food to become contaminated with food -not it's end product.
There may or may not be a case for believing what Cadbury says. It is an odd coincidence about the blip in cases of food poisoning though. And a bloody daft idea letting any -even the tiniest amount, get the go by.
I suspect the lax mid level management failed to do the decent thing and report the problem to someone with the clout to call an halt on the line. I also suspect it wasn't a drop of fluid from any such plumbing. I'll bet good money it was sabotage.
You'd expect a government run establishment like a nuclear reactor or some such to line the coast with plutonium as happened in Dounray for decades until Greenpeace poked their oar in. (Well not exactly UNTIL.... rather several years later -if ever)
But this sort of corruption is endemic these days. British Airways have been up to all sorts of dirty tricks apparently, FIFA and almost every governing body of one sort or another are rank with corruption. It's not good enough that these agencies are not corrupt. They must be seen to be not corrupt.
I'd not touch any suspect chocolate no matter what reassurances were offered. Ta very much.
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