“This year, we are going to do without Kinder”, say customers from Berry

It’s a must during the Easter holidays: chocolate! But since early April, tons of batches of Kinder products have been withdrawn from sale and recalled due to the discovery of at least 150 cases of salmonellosis in Europe. In France, at least 21 people were poisoned, including eight who had to be hospitalized.

After the Buitoni frozen pizza scandal, this new affair is bad news for stores that sell chocolate. Easter holidays are one of the times of the year when they usually sell a lot. “Kinder is more than 50% of the activitysays Jean-Philippe Dupuy, the director of Auchan in Poinçonnet. We have removed the affected lots from the store and we are informing our customers. We will destroy the lots”.

Kinder represents more than half of the chocolates usually sold at Easter

On the shelves, most Kinder chocolates have therefore disappeared and leave large empty stalls. “I wanted to watch for my grandchildren, but hey, there’s not so much choice anymore”, notices Marie, doing her shopping. And yet, at Easter, chocolates from the famous brand with orange and white packaging are often a must. “I have grown-up children and they still ask me for their Kinder Easter egg”, says Damien. For Anne-Marie, we will have to change habits: “I like the Kinder, my granddaughter too, but this year we will do without”.

“Even if not all Kinder products are affected, people are inevitably apprehensive about this brand”, says Jean-Philippe Dupuy, from the Auchan store in Poinçonnet. Some customers explain that they prefer to favor other brands in the future.

Supermarkets have to deal with the situation

“We organize ourselves as we organized ourselves with what happened with Buitoni, or a few years ago with milk”, he continues. At the Intermarché de Buzançais, the store manager explains that the teams are trained and responsive when this kind of situation happens. “The procedure is well established”says Cédric Kuligouwski, the store manager.

After having emptied the Kinder shelves, placed posters to inform customers, recalled the products sold, it is now necessary to manage the risk of stock shortages of chocolates from other brands. “For operations like Easter, we order several months in advance, so it is not possible to have a restock on the rest of the range”says Cédric Kuligouwski.

“We could not have guessed that there would be these worriesadds his colleague Jean-Philippe Dupuy. For the moment it’s fine, but we risk running out of products on certain products”.