Expired Food Found At Major E-Commerce Warehouses In Telangana After Special Inspections

Food safety officials in Telangana recently conducted a special round of inspections across the state. They visited many warehouses owned by leading e-commerce platforms such as Zepto, Flipkart, Zomato, Swiggy, Reliance JioMart, Blinkit, BigBasket, and Amazon. Some other local units were also inspected. The food safety team took to X (formerly Twitter) to share a summary of their findings. They revealed that they covered a total of 75 warehouses and flagged a range of food safety issues on their premises.

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The officials seized more than 1900 'problematic' food units - these items were either expired, misbranded or had misleading labels. The team also discarded a staggering 76 kilos of food that was either expired, stale or rotten. They collected 98 enforcement and 124 surveillance samples for further testing. They also issued 32 improvement notices to the food establishments.

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This is not the first time the food safety team in Telangana has shared the findings of their warehouse inspections. Last year, one of their posts about a visit to a Zomato warehouse went viral online and prompted a reply from the company's CEO. During an inspection on October 29, 2024, the officials raided a Zomato-owned Hyperpure warehouse in Kukatpally, Hyderabad. They discovered about 18 kg of button mushrooms labelled with a future "packing date" (October 30, 2024) - a date after the inspection itself. In response, Zomato's CEO Deepinder Goyal acknowledged that 90 packets of mushrooms were incorrectly dated, attributing it to a "manual typing error" by the vendor. He said that those packets had been identified and rejected during the warehouse's quality-check, and that the vendor had been delisted. Click here to know more.