The parents of seven-year-old Berenice have spoken out about the hell their daughter went through after eating a Buitoni Fraich'Up pizza. The brand has urgently recalled its batches of pizzas contaminated with E.coli bacteria, which were the cause of the girl's hospitalisation and the food poisoning of dozens of other children. In the wake of the scandal, a former employee of one of Buitoni's factories has come forward and revealed disgusting images of where the pizzas were made.
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The disgusting images of a Buitoni pizza factory
This Thursday, March 31 on RMC, a French radio station, a former employee of the Buitoni factory in Caudry said he was shocked but not surprised by the food scandal surrounding the pizzas. In front of journalists, the man highlighted the deplorable hygiene conditions of his former workplace:
When you see mushrooms on the wall, you know that it's not right (...) In the sauce trays, you could find cigarette butts. Where the flour is sent to the belts, so that the dough doesn't stick, there were flour worms. Most people didn't wash their hands, even when they came back from the toilet.
This contamination doesn’t surprise him and he believes it could have happened much earlier:
There was clear cross-contamination, I am surprised that there were no accidents before.
In the photos and videos that the former employee gave to RMC, we discover food on the floor, a pizza press that is rarely cleaned and covered in oil.
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Was Buitoni aware of the deplorable state of its factories?
According to the former employee, the management was aware of the poor hygiene conditions:
For 18 months, I spoke about it and I was often told that 'yes', I was right and that they were in the process of seeing to it and that it was going to change, but basically, nothing was moving forward.
However, the Nestlé Group, which owns the Buitoni brand, says it does not know how the E.coli bacteria could have contaminated its pizzas.
Since March 18, the Swiss multinational has closed its two production lines in Caudry and says the factory will not resume production until the source of the bacteria has been determined. For its part, the fraud control authorities are continuing their investigations to discover the origin of the contamination. The former employee had tried to alert consumers via the media Mr Mondialisation.
This article was translated from Oh!MyMag FR.
