“Nestlé will have to be accountable”, says Foodwatch

“Nestlé will have to be held accountable”launches Friday, March 31 on franceinfo Ingrid Kragl, director of information at Foodwatch, the day after the announcement by the agri-food giant of the definitive closure of its Buitoni factory in Caudry, one year after the case of frozen pizzas contaminated with the bacterium Escherichia coli.

>> Closing of the Buitoni factory in Caudry: “It’s a social drama that is playing out”, laments the mayor of the town

The NGO Foodwatch has filed a complaint against the Nestlé group, which it accuses of having carried out “poor risk assessment” and to be “shown very opaque”. She claims that these Fraîch’Up pizzas, considered to be the cause of several serious cases of contamination of children, two of whom died, were “exported to fifteen African countries”.

Company self-monitoring is unreliable

For Ingrid Kragl, “what this scandal [sanitaire] shows is that you can’t trust a multinational like Nestlé to assess the risks.”. The director of information of the NGO regrets that the current system “rely heavily on self-checks” companies, gold according to Ingrid Kragl, “we can’t trust it blindly”. She therefore pleads for “public resources commensurate with the challenges and prevention”, without what “this type of scandal is likely to happen again”.

“It is an obligation of the State to protect consumers and there, the account is not there.”

Ingrid Kragl, Chief Information Officer at Foodwatch

at franceinfo

While 130 employees are threatened by this closure of the Caudry factory, Ingrid Kragl wishes to support them: “It is regrettable that employees must pay, in addition to consumers, the consequences of this poor risk assessment by Nestlé”she says.