Foodhall Bandra store sells expired, fungus-laden imported chocolate

(Left) The Foodhall Linking Road outlet in Mumbai, which sold the infested Merci chocolates.

Checking the expiry date of a food product before buying it is a good idea but an incident at a premium food products retailer shows it may not be nearly good enough.

On December 5, Graeme Diron (name changed), who visited the Foodhall outlet at Linking Road (Bandra), Mumbai, purchased bars of Merci chocolates worth Rs 500 each.

A day later when she opened the packet, she found a layer of fungus on the chocolate.

While Diron disposed of the chocolate immediately, she dug out the wrapper to see the expiry date to ensure she did not buy a bad product. However, she found a black hand-cut label which bore the expiry date 28.09.2019.

Since the label was not finely cut and appeared to have been stamped on to a base sticker that had text embossed on it, Diron took a stencil to map the text below.

To her surprise, a new expiry date, pressed on the cover, emerged. It was 03.07.2017. The product was expired but it was relabeled and sold as new.

"I was furious. If you're knowingly selling an expired product, it is not acceptable," Diron told Moneycontrol. Her daughter had consumed some of the expired chocolates.

When Diron went to the Foodhall outlet to complain, the store manager blamed the vendor for selling spoilt products.

Thereafter, the store took down the remaining Merci chocolates from the store's shelves and assured the customer that action would be taken against the vendor.

A spokesperson from Future Retail, owner of the Foodhall chain, told Moneycontrol the same thing.

"The product and the expiry date written on it comes from the vendor directly and we don't make any alterations in the packaging. However, after receiving the complaint, we have initiated an inquiry on the supplier and have also sought an explanation from them," the spokesperson said.

"As a policy, we take these incidents very seriously and do not hesitate terminating contracts with vendors if found guilty. We are also in constant touch with the customer and have kept her in the loop on the whole situation," the spokesperson added.

Foodhall, however, would not say if there was a lapse in their process of procurement.

What's more interesting is while the original expiry date of the product appears to be July 2017, the product was imported in 2018.

Moneycontrol also spoke to the vendor, also the importer of the product -- referred to by Foodhall --who passed the buck on the lapse on the exporter.

"We imported the product from Europe and when the product arrived, it was put on stores," the vendor said, adding that he had never come across such a situation before.