milk product scare

Morinaga Milk Industry,A major Japanese food manufacturer has found traces of an industrial chemical in some of its products that were made in China, as a food safety scare centered on tainted milk continued to spread, health officials said Friday.

The news came as Japan added food products from 12 Asian countries and territories with a record of importing milk products from China to a watch list for special inspections.

Japan’s Marudai Food Co pulled its cream buns, meat buns and creamed corn crepes from supermarkets a week ago as the tainted milk scandal in China began to unfold. Its tests have since found traces of the industrial chemical melamine in several of the recalled products, Health and Welfare Ministry official Mina Kojima said.

Japan's third largest dairy company posted [yen] 431.2bn in sales for its 1999 financial year, ending March 1999, for a net profit of [yen] 2.5bn and a current profit of [yen] 8.7bn, up compared with sales of [yen] 418.2bn in 1998, for a [yen] 2.5bn net profit and a current profit of [yen] 7.5bn. Morinaga Milk's main business is dairy products; it posted [yen] 193bn, it holds a 8% share of market milk and which represented 45% of the sales in dairy product business. Sales of condensed milk, dried milk, cheese and butter, represented 20% of the sales, for [yen] 84.8bn. Morinaga Milk ranks second on the yogurt market with a 19% market share ; its sales came to [yen] 55bn in 1998. It also ranks second on the ice cream market, posting sales of [yen] 51.3bn, up 4%. Morinaga Milk leads the coffee creamer market; it sold 7.350 tonnes of its Creap brand which holds a 34% market share. In 1998, Morinaga Milk sold [yen] 520mn worth of baby food for a 2.5% market share, and it ranks third on the infant milk market, where it holds a 26% market share, for a sales volume of 9,000 tonnes. In addition to dairy products, Morinaga is involved in soft drinks, chilled foods, fertilisers, effluent treatment plants, coffee creamer, infant foods, tofu, dairy engineering, farming, pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, cosmetics, and real estate. It exports tofu to 32 countries, and sells tofu with a long shelf life in the United States. Morinaga milk's soft drink sales came to [yen] 33.8bn in 1998, representing 8% of sales. Morinaga milk spent [yen] 10bn biotechnology research laboratory which is to produce drugs for cancer from bifidus bacteria, and to develop other drugs designed to counteract side effects of cancer

Marudai has sold more than 300,000 of the products, most of which are believed to have been consumed, but so far there have been no reports of health problems, she said.

Company executive Masaaki Sugiyama told a news conference that two kinds of cream buns and the crepes had traces of melamine, but the amount was so small that it posed no health threat. He apologized for the company’s failure to prevent the contamination.

The public health department in Takatsuki, a western city where Marudai is headquartered, said its lab tests found one of the cream buns, “Cream Panda,” contained melamine 74 times higher than the tolerable daily intake level set by the European Food Safety Agency.

But public health official Mami Matsumoto said an average adult would need to eat 33 crepes or 17 panda buns every day to risk being sickened.

“Nobody eats so many of them. We believe the risk is negligible,” Matsumoto said.

The ministry said earlier Friday that it had suspended imports of milk and milk products from China, and had singled out products from 12 other countries and territories for close inspection. The move was meant to prevent tainted products from entering the country, ministry official Yoshiya Nishimura said.