Chocolate factory confirms no salmonella-positive chocolate hit the shelves

The world's biggest chocolate factory had a salmonella scare earlier this week, which forced production to be paused.

After reaching out to all customers supplied with impacted chocolate products, Barry Callebaut has confirmed, based on its internal investigation, that no affected chocolate products by the salmonella-positive production lot in Wieze, Belgium, entered the retail food chain.

The plant is known to supply products to major clients such as Hershey, Mondelez, Nestle and Unilever. Barry Callebaut is the world's number one in its sector, with annual sales of around $7.9 billion year 2020/21. The Group runs more than 60 production facilities worldwide and employs a diverse and dedicated global workforce of more than 13,000 people.

"Food safety is of the utmost importance for Barry Callebaut, and this contamination is quite exceptional. We have a well-defined food safety charter and procedures," the firm said.

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The chocolate production in Wieze will remain suspended until further notice. Barry Callebaut is diligently pursuing its very thorough root cause analysis and keeping the FAVV informed in the process. When the analyses are completed the lines will be cleaned and disinfected before the production process resumes.

The incident came just after a few months when families were urged to throw away any Kinder Eggs due to a salmonella risk. In the UK, 70 children fell ill with food poisoning due to the outbreak with symptoms such as fever, diarrhoea and abdominal cramps.

It was reported there were more cases recorded in Europe, including Ireland, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.

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