Website collects product warnings: a scary number of products are unsafe
Food safety is generally pretty well sorted in the Netherlands. Not many deep-fried towels or strawberries full of spiders are sold here. And if something is wrong, there are big warnings in the newspaper. But when you look at this site, it still seems as though something goes wrong with food every week.
The website productwaarschuwing.nl collects all the recalls and warnings issued for products. On the site, you’ll see not only bright yellow children’s T-shirts from Zeeman that were dyed with the wrong paint, or power banks that can give you an electric shock, but also a long list of food products that have something wrong with them.
Milk, soy, peanuts
For example, it recently emerged that a batch of Chio snacks had made it onto supermarket shelves without product information on the packaging. Not such a disaster, you might say: you know there are salty snacks in the packet, but the product information also states that the snacks may contain sesame, peanuts, milk and soy. And people can be seriously allergic to those! So watch out for allergy customers.
Hemp tea was bad news
The hemp tea sold at Lidl also had to be removed from the shelves in a hurry. The tea contained too much THC, so it should really have been sold at a coffeeshop. And Vomar customers had to return their filet americain because the use-by date had accidentally not been printed on the container. Oops!
Highly toxic
It gets even more frightening when you look at the products in which ethylene oxide has been found. It is a crop protection product, traces of which sometimes turn out to be present in food. It is strictly banned in Europe, and not without reason: it is carcinogenic and harmful to reproduction. The Foodwatch organization has been taking action for more than a year to get all those products containing ethylene oxide removed from sale, but that is no easy task. Did you know you can sometimes find it in sesame seeds, coconut water and food supplements? You’d better check that online list then.
Also read:
- 10 fast-food workers spill the beans: I would neeeever order this
- How long can you keep cooked chicken in the fridge?
- Do you really sleep better after drinking (moon) milk?
