US FDA rejects more snacks from India than any other country

Data on the United States Food and Drugs Association (FDA) website shows that it has rejected more snack imports from India than any other country in the first five months of 2015.

According to the US FDA website, Indian products were found to contain high levels of pesticides, mould and the bacteria salmonella, a report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said. The report mentions that more than half of all snacks that were tested and then restricted from being sold in the US this year were from India, which also leads the number of snack rejects across the world.

The WSJ report also mentions that most of the rejected food from India actually came from Nagpur-based Indian snacks giant Haldiram’s. Among the rejected Haldiram’s products were some sugar candies and salty Indian snack mixes. The FDA said on its website that it rejected the Haldiram’s products because it found pesticides in them.

In one case, the FDA referred to a product from Gujarat as consisting “in whole or part of a filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance or be otherwise unfit for food.”

And baked Indian snacks are on top of the list that finds it difficult to enter the States, says the report. More than half of the 217 imported baked products rejected by the US FDA so far this year were from India. 

With the recent controversy regarding the presence of lead in Nestle’s Maggi, a heightened concern over the safety of processed food in India has sent Food Safety and Standards Authority of India into a testing frenzy.

These reports surfaced even as Nestle challenged the ban in Bombay High Court on Thursday, claiming its own tests had not detected high levels of lead, as the authorities alleged.

Earlier, several Indian states such as Goa, Karnataka and West Bengal had cleared Maggi after tests.