Assocham supports bread makers, says report is scaremongering by NGOs

Says spreading panic among consumers and causing a drop in the sale of bread and bakery products is unacceptable

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham) on Tuesday came in support of bread makers, terming the recent report of bread containing poisonous toxins as "scaremongering", which has hurt consumer confidence.

Assocham said spreading panic among consumers and causing a drop in the sale of bread and bakery products was unacceptable. It added crores of rupees worth of loss was expected, due to widespread public fear over buying bread. The share price of these companies have also reportedly started to fall after the report.

"The industry will surely be at fault if it was using the PM in violation of the FSSAI rules. If at all, there is a problem, it does not lie at the door of the industry, which only would be put to immense loss of consumer confidence and crores of rupees worth of loss." ASSOCHAM Secretary General D S Rawat said.

He said Assocham supported adoption of internationally accepted food standards, adding, the first contact point for NGOs should be the government and regulator, not industry.

FSSAI on Monday said it has decided to remove potassium bromate from the list of permitted additives while it is examining evidence against potassium iodate before restricting its use.

FSSAI CEO Pawan Kumar Agarwal said the additive is one of 11,000 food additives that are allowed in the food business.

Major multinational fast food outlets including KFC, Pizza Hut, Domino's, Subway and McDonald's are also selling pizzas and burgers made of breads laced with the poisonous toxins, CSE had said. In its report, CSE claimed that while one of the chemicals is a category 2B carcinogen (possibly carcinogenic to humans), the other could trigger thyroid disorders.

Rawat said the impression that bread manufacturers are deliberately causing risk to the public health is damaging. A similar thing had happened in the case of Maggi noodles, he said, pointing out that the noodles had 'finally returned to the market after an effective court intervention, but not without several hundreds of crores of rupees of loss to the manufacturers.'