S'pore woman finds plastic mixed in with minced meat bought from Giant supermarket

Look before you cook.

Sulaiman Daud | September 06, 2018, 09:24 PM

One woman found an unexpected ingredient when she tried making a dish with minced pork.

On Sept. 4, Facebook user Candy Chan shared her experience in finding bits of plastic mixed in with the minced meat.

Here's her post.

Here's what happened

On Sept. 4, at around 3:00 pm, Chan's helper allegedly purchased a packet of minced meat from the Giant supermarket outlet in Marine Terrace.

While boiling the meat, she discovered strands of plastic mixed in.

Gif from Candy Chan's video.

Second packet also had plastic

Chan asked her helper to go back to the same outlet and buy another pack of minced pork from the same brand, to see if it was a one off incident.

She bought another packet at about 8:00 pm.

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Pic from Candy Chan's Facebook page.

Unfortunately, they discovered more scraps of plastic in the second packet too:

Gif from Candy Chan's Facebook video.

Even after boiling the meat at a high temperature, the plastic did not melt.

Screen shot from Candy Chan's Facebook video.

Response

When contacted, a Giant spokesperson said:

"Giant takes food safety and quality issues very seriously. We initiated an immediate removal of this batch of item from all stores yesterday to protect customer safety, and as a matter of urgency, have contacted the supplier to look into the issue.

Customers are advised to contact our customer service team directly on 1800-891-8100 or via email [email protected] should they have any feedback or questions regarding purchases from our stores."

A spokesperson for Tiong Lian Food Pte Ltd also responded, here's their statement in full:

"After being informed yesterday (Sept. 5), we immediately initiated an urgent removal of all affected products from further purchase by other customer(s).

We have since took immediate actions and found out that it was due to our staff had overlooked the transparent plastic packaging that got stuck in between our imported frozen meat which was wrapped tightly with plastic. Our quality checker also failed to spot the transparent plastic hidden within the finished product (frozen thawed minced meat).

We are deeply sorry regarding this incident that happened and our company owes our valued customers the deepest apologies, we take pride in our customer satisfaction and such a mistake is not acceptable.

To prevent this issue from happening again, we will implement stringent quality checks for any foreign material before and after the production of our products and ensure that such mistake will not occur again."

Top image adapted from Candy Chan's Facebook page.