Fujiya Told Factory Not to Indicate Expiry Dates on Puddings
By Kyodo News International, Tokyo
Jan. 25–TOKYO — Scandal-plagued Fujiya Co. said Thursday its head office had instructed a cake factory in Osaka Prefecture to refrain from indicating expiry dates on puddings that were shipped to another facility in Saitama Prefecture.
The company backtracked from an earlier statement that factories made independent decisions on the indication of expiry dates.
The Osaka prefectural government has told the Izumisano factory in Osaka that its failure to indicate expiry dates on food products could run counter to the Food Sanitation Law and should be corrected.
The Izumisano factory sent puddings without expiry date labels to the Saitama factory under instructions from the head office issued May 24 and 27, 2004. The Saitama factory then put expiry date labels on the puddings before shipping them to retail shops, the company said.
The head office instructed the Saitama factory to dispose of all puddings from Izumisano that were not shipped a day after receipt, Fujiya said.
But the Saitama factory made an independent decision to ship the old puddings by extending the expiry dates one or two days beyond Fujiya’s in-house guidelines, the company said.
The independent decision deviated from the head office’s instructions, it said.
Fujiya has suspended sales at Fujiya cake shops in Japan since Jan. 11 due to its reported use of expired ingredients in cream puffs, as well as the extension of expiry dates for puddings and cream puffs. Major retailers have removed Fujiya confectionery products from their shelves.
The company announced Thursday a 903 million yen gain on securities sales and said it will issue new earnings estimates taking account of the scandal.
Earlier, Fujiya projected its group net profit for fiscal 2006 at 800 million yen, against the previous year’s net loss of 1.8 billion yen.
The securities sales had already been planned last November and had nothing to do with the scandal, the company said. But Fujiya is expected to accelerate sales of securities and other assets, including its head office building in Tokyo, to help offset losses from the scandal, company sources said earlier.
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