Hyderabad: A team from the food safety department inspected a Zomato Hyperpure warehouse in Hyderabad’s Kukatpally on October 29. The warehouse, run by Zomato, supplies fresh vegetables, groceries, packaged food, meat, kitchen equipment, and other consumables to restaurants, hotels, and caterers. During the inspection by the food safety task force, the officials seized 18 kgs of button mushrooms with a ‘future date of packing’.
The packaging date on the mushroom packets read October 30, 2024, while the inspection was done a day before. Many other issues regarding food quality and hygiene were also flagged, however, the packaging date issue received a lot of flak online.
Zomato CEO responds
Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal shared his response to the entire controversy on micro-blogging site X on Monday. He acknowledged the fact that 90 packets of button mushrooms were discovered at the Zomato facility with incorrect packaging dates. However, he defended the brand and its warehouse and claimed that the faulty packets “had already been identified by the warehouse team and were rejected during an inward quality check”.
In addition to this, he called the incident “not usual” and the result of “a manual typing error on the vendor’s side”. Goyal added that necessary action has been taken in this regard and the concerned vendor has been delisted from Zomato’s database. In his tweet, he said, “At Hyperpure, we have stringent inward guidelines and tech systems that helped our teams to identify this error in time. We are committed to upholding industry food safety standards and are focused on not compromising on product quality at any stage of the supply chain. The recent food safety inspection at our Hyderabad warehouse resulted in the Hyperpure warehouse achieving an A+ rating, highest benchmark in their ranking.”
Hello all – just want to clarify that the fssai team noted that 90 packets of button mushrooms had incorrect packaging date – these were already identified by our warehouse team and were rejected during an inward QC. This is not usual, and was due to a manual typing error on the…
— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) November 4, 2024
Consumer court slaps Rs 35K fine on Swiggy
Recently, a consumer court in Ranga Reddy area here ruled against the Swiggy food delivery app for inflating delivery distances and also overcharging one of its customers with a Swiggy One membership. In its order, the consumer court announced Swiggy guilty of ‘unfair trade practices’ and directed it to pay compensation of a total of Rs 35,453 to the complainant, Emmadi Suresh Babu.
