The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, has put in place additional measures to curtail the incidence of unbranded cereals and other food items of industrial sizes.
The director general, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, who made the statement at the end of an open dialogue and feedback session with food manufacturing companies, said that the unbranded milk and cereals have their attendant health hazards for the undiscerning consumers because of the mode of dispensing them in unsanitary conditions.
Adeyeye, represented by the director of Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, FSAN, Mrs. Eva Edwards, registered the concerns of the Agency over the perennial problem of ubiquity of bulk food items that are found in the markets, possibly from the manufacturing plants or their suppliers, describing it as unacceptable.
She noted that the items entered the country because companies have applied to use them in the manufacture of their NAFDAC-registered products.
“We are concerned that we find these items being sold in measures, scoops in the open markets. So we are looking at that process of issuing permits for bulk food raw materials very critically,” she said.
According to her, the Agency has put in place additional measures for assessing and verifying the utilisation records of each company that applies for import permits to import bulk food raw materials.
“We don’t want to just see your stock cards, we want to know what you imported in the previous year. We want to know what you used because there are some calculations that we need to make,” she explained.
NAFDAC to curb unbranded milk, cereals from open markets