New Delhi: On October 29, a food safety official raided Zomato’s Hyderabad Hyperpure warehouse and they found 18 kg of button mushrooms labeled and packed on October 30. Zomato’s CEO Deepinder Goyal took to Twitter to clarify the controversy and clarify details on the recent food safety raid on the food delivery giant’s Hyderabad’s Hyperpure warehouse wherein 90 packets of button mushrooms were found with the future-dated packaging.
“These were already identified by our warehouse team and were rejected during an inward Quality Control”, Goyal wrote on Twitter This is not usual and was due to a manual typing error on the vendor’s side, he added mentioning that tech systems helped the teams the to identify error at time. Goyal went on to say that the vendor had been delisted from Zomato’s database and emphasized that the Hyperpure warehouse had received an A+ rating, the highest benchmark in the FSSAI’s ranking.
What happened in the warehouse?
Zoamto’s Hyperpure warehouse is located in Kukatpally, Hyderabad, and is known as an FBO (Food Business Operator) which supplies fruit, vegetables, meat, seafood, gourmet foods, packaging, consumables, kitchen equipment, etc, to hotels, restaurants, and caterers. Food officials conducted a raid on October 29, 2024, and found 18kgs of button mushrooms being labeled as packed on October 30, 2024, a future date of packaging, when the date of packing is written as a future date rather than the actual date of packing.
Goyal wrote he was not sure why the small number of mushroom packets worth Rs.7,200 were never going to make it to customers, and are being talked with the media, while we got an A+ rating. He went on to allege that some people benefit from virality which they get at the expense of pulling the Zomato brand, and maybe we love to believe the narrative that all big business is bad business However, the report also suggested that the officials found house flies inside the warehouse and noted it didn’t have a proper insect-proof screen. On top of that, a few of the food handlers not wearing hair caps and aprons. This is despite the warehouse having the license, and medical fitness certificates of food handlers and pest control records.
