Buitoni and the ravioli scandal
Published on 20/2/2013
Twenty countries have now pulled packs of ravioli by the well-known French brand, part of the Nestlè galaxy, from the market on suspicion of counterfeiting.
The withdrawn batches, with best-before dates up to 8 April 2013, are specifically: "I Ravioli di Brasato Buitoni" and "I Tortellini di Carne", both made with raw materials from the German company H.J. Schypke. Tests detected traces of horse DNA in the two products, which declared beef only. To be precise, the amount of horse meat in the dozens of products withdrawn from the market in other countries ranges from 40 to 60%.
It all began in Great Britain on 8 February, when a spot check found a percentage of horse meat of roughly 60% in the products analysed. On 13 February the EU Commission decided that all Member States should carry out checks on products containing beef to verify the absence of horse meat.
In those same days Nestlè issued a press release offering reassurance about the quality of the product, citing the cost of horse meat (decidedly higher than beef) as counter-evidence.
The problem would lie in the fact that the investigations carried out so far have revealed traces of an anti-inflammatory drug, phenylbutazone, widely used to treat inflammatory conditions in racehorses, which are by law absolutely excluded from the food chain, first and foremost because of the drug treatments the animals undergo.