Traces of glass found in ready meals ‘no risk to human health’

A FOOD alert has emerged after tiny traces of glass were discovered in ready-to-eat frozen meals made by the Kerry Group.

However, food safety experts have advised there is no cause for concern or risk to human health.

Food Safety Authority Ireland spokesman Jeff Moon said: “We identified all of the British products and all of the Irish products affected. There is no cause for concern in that the (supermarket) companies have withdrawn the product.

“There has been no complaint from the Irish products that I am aware of.”

Tiny fragments of glass — undetectable by x-ray analysis — were found in a small number of frozen foods produced by Rye Valley Foods.

As a result “thousands of units” of the affected products have been withdrawn from major supermarket outlets across Ireland and Britain.

The original complaint relates to a Birds Eye chicken curry meal sold in Britain, where there were 20 customer complaints.

Owned by the Kerry Group, Rye Valley Foods is Europe’s largest manufacturer of frozen ready food products. It operates a state-of-the-art facility at Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, with 600 staff producing between two and three million meals a week.

The world-class facility produces own-brand products for top supermarkets in Britain such as Asda, Birds Eye and Sainsbury’s, along with supplying Tesco and Musgrave/SuperValu/Centra in this country.

A spokesman for the Kerry Group apologised for the potential contamination of its products, traced to a batch of long-grained US rice that contained tiny hard pieces of glass. He said it was the first time such as incident had happened. The Kerry Group took over the facility in 2001 but Rye Valley was in existence for nearly 20 years, he said.

The alert was triggered when British customers found tiny fragments of rounded glass in their frozen meals.

A spokesperson for Tesco said the products being recalled represented four lines out of 20,000 products carried by the 94 Tesco stores in this country. The majority of the products being recalled were still in storage when the supermarket was advised of the potential problem. “We received no complaints from customers,” the spokesperson said.

Musgrave SuperValu-Centre, which has 560 outlets, said no fragments have been detected in their products.

The Kerry Foods spokesman said they had 20 complaints relating to tiny fragments of glass which were rounded and did not cause any injury.

“We investigated the source of this problem and the common link was to a batch of long-grained rice, imported from the US.

“We then reported the matter to the food safety standards authorities in both countries and to our customers. We judged it prudent, purely as a precautionary measure, to withdraw lines of products produced with that batch of rice.

“All of that product has now been taken off the shelves. We found no other evidence of this contaminant, so we’re confident and happy to confirm it’s isolated,” he said.

Product recall

* Tesco Healthy Living Chicken Curry 350g

* Tesco Healthy Living Chicken Tikka 350g

* Tesco Value Chicken Curry 350g

* Tesco Value Sweet and Sour Chicken 350g

* SuperValu Chicken Curry 350g

* SuperValu Low Fat Chicken Curry 350g

* SuperValu Low Fat Sweet & Sour Chicken 350g

* Centra Chicken Curry 350g

* Birds Eye Chicken Curry 400g.