Shanghai
has shut a factory of US food provider OSI Group for selling out-of-date meat
to restaurant giants including McDonald's and KFC, authorities said Monday in
China's latest food safety scandal.
Shanghai
television, which reported the original allegations, said that workers at the
OSI China plant in the city mixed expired meat with the fresh product and
deliberately misled quality inspectors from McDonald's.
Other customers
included Burger King, Papa John's Pizza, coffee chain Starbucks and sandwich
maker Subway, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported Monday.
City
officials closed the factory on Sunday and seized products which allegedly used
expired meat, the Shanghai food and drug administration said in a statement.
Police were
investigating, it said, threatening "severe punishment" in future.
McDonald's
said in a statement it had "immediately" stopped using the factory's
products while Yum separately said its KFC and Pizza Hut restaurants had also
halted use of its meat.
China has
been rocked by a series of food and product safety problems, due to lax
enforcement of regulations and corner-cutting by producers.
One of the
worst occurred in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have
been illegally added to dairy products, killing at least six babies and making
300,000 people ill.
Retail
giant Walmart of the United States said early this year that it would tighten
inspections of its suppliers in China after it was forced to recall donkey meat
products that had been found to contain fox.
Last year,
China detained hundreds of people for food safety crimes, including selling rat
and fox meat disguised as beef and mutton, following a three-month crackdown,
police said.
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