Wait, don't eat that: candy scandal stuns Japan

International Herald Tribune ^ | October 30, 2007 | Norimitsu Onishi

[jwalburg]

ISE, Japan, Oct. 26 — It was supposed to be a celebratory year for Akafuku, a confectioner that had been selling bean-jam sweets here since 1707. On its 300th anniversary, its top-selling sweets were still indispensable gifts to bring back home or to the office after a trip to Ise Shrine here, Japan's holiest religious site.

Instead, Akafuku has become the latest Japanese food company to be exposed for lying about the contents of its products, tampering with expiration-date labels and recycling ingredients. For only the second time in its history, Akafuku, which was forced to halt production during World War II because of a sugar scarcity, has suspended operations, this time indefinitely.

Even as details of a government investigation into Akafuku have come out in recent days, executives at a meatpacking company called Meat Hope were arrested for labeling ground pork, chicken and even rabbit as 100 percent beef. Separately, the 76-year-old president of Hinaidori, a poultry company, admitted to mislabeling his chicken products after he disappeared for several days in the mountains in a failed suicide attempt.

The nearly daily disclosures have shaken Japanese consumers, who have long been willing to pay a premium for Japanese food products that were, or so it was said, safer than imported goods, especially from China. But the scandals involving the freshness of products by Akafuku, as well as two other nationally known confectioners, Shiroi Koibito and Fujiya, have resonated beyond the marketplace in a way that chicken or beef does not.

Akafuku and Shiroi Koibito were two of the most popular sweets in a deeply-entrenched gift-giving culture that requires any traveler to bring local edibles to relatives or colleagues back home.

[jwalburg]

But according to a government investigation, for at last three decades Akafuku had systematically reused up to 90 percent of its unsold products, using the ingredients to make new sweets or passing them on to an affiliated confectioner. What is more, the company had forward-dated expiration date labels and had frozen and thawed the sweets.

Three decades? Makes it kind of a late warning you'd think.

[Reaganesque]

I wonder if Akafuku is Japanese for Whizzo?

Whizzo Chocolate Company.

[dljordan]

Good grief! I just spent 30 minutes watching Monty Python videos.

[Reaganesque]

Well, what’s a few more minutes? ;-)

[Iwentsouth]

Wonder if the same thing is happening with there Kobe beef producers and other such products.

[TexasRepublic]

No more Crunchy Frog? sob!

[jwalburg]

I stopped watching Monty Python after the Mr. Creosote business. Stomach just couldn’t take it anymore.