Grocery stores should have pulled product off shelves, food safety expert says

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WATCH: A food safety expert says affected grocery stores should have pulled certain products off their shelves after pins were found in some sausages. Calvin To reports.

 

Food safety expert Keith Warriner says certain grocery stores in Nanaimo should have done more after pins were found on their shelves.

On Monday, Nanaimo RCMP warned the public after finding three incidents of product tampering involving Grimm’s sausages.

The first incident happened last December when a sewing pin was found in a pepperoni stick sold at Costco.

RCMP say the customer immediately brought it to Costco’s attention, but that police were not notified until this past March.

By then, another pin had been found in a pepperoni stick of the same brand at The Real Canadian Superstore.

“What the grocery store should’ve done is recall all that product and definitely stop selling it and definitely report it to the authorities,” Warriner said.

“They shouldn’t have waited until now to suddenly say, ‘Well, back in December, we had a pin in a sausage, but everything’s good now.’ It’s not what those sorts of companies should do.”

The third pin was found inside a Ukrainian sausage sold at Fairway Market and police say there have been no further cases since early April.

They are now conducting a criminal investigation, but Warriner has his own theories.

“It’s a repeat offender,” Warriner said. “It’s not as if it’s just a single [person] venting out. So, the likelihood is they’ll eventually make a mistake, or, if they’re going for economic gain, as in blackmail, then they probably will slip up there.”

According to Warriner, these types of incidents likely occur more often than the public knows.

“A lot of times, as we’ve seen in this case, they don’t report it because they don’t want to get this hysteria because they know what economic damage it would do,” he said. “So in a lot of ways, we don’t really know how often this occurs.”

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