Food dept raids at Pizza Hut on Puja eve, noticed served for serving food without shelf life

In a sudden raid at the Agartala outlet of world’s renowned Pizza chain of restaurants, ‘ Pizza Hut’, the enforcement team of Food department, SDM (Sadar) along with officials of health and food safety commission, Legal Metrology and Health department has issued notice after they found many irregularities including serving of  adulterated and contaminated food without shelf life of a food packet, which are becoming a threat for most concerning issues of hygienic and health safety.

Official sources said that based on the complaint registered by a class-ten student of Agartala, who is also a member of Consumer Club of the school, a jambo team of Food department along with enforcement teams of Sadar SDM, Legal Metrology and Health department raided at the Agartala outlet of Pizza Hut on Wednesday afternoon.

During the raid, the officials found many discrepancies and irregularities over preserved stock used to prepare Pizza.

After their raid, speaking with media persons Souvik Bardhan, an official of the Legal Metrology department said that the team has  found no shelf life in the packet and preserved different food items used for preparing pizza. ‘There was no-declaration of the food packets and there was also no-shelf life, which indicates,  Pizza Hut authorities are serving contaminated food,’ said Bardhan.

He said that there are lots of irregularities over the sizes of pizza and stores' electronic weight machines were not also verified from the concern department.

Different items including chilli flakes, flour used for making pizza do not have any shelf life declaration, said Bardhan and added that the department has issued a notice to them.

Now, Pizza Hut authorities have to submit their reply within a short period over their discrepancies noticed by the departments with the rectification process, else the department would take more stringent steps in coming days, said a top official of the Food department.

The team has also collected  samples of all cooked food items, edible oil, different kinds of species, salts and water, which is being used for preparing pizzas.

“We asked the Food Safety Commissioner to check the adulteration of foods and after finding reports of all collected samples, the department will take all legal steps as per food safety act”, said Food Safety officer, Pradip Bhowmik.

Bhowmik said that such raids in restaurants, food outlets and hotels will continue and if necessary, other hotels and restaurants found to be serving or preserving contaminated food will also be closed down in coming days.