Five years after the case of Lactalis infant milk contaminated with salmonella, the investigative media Disclose published an investigation on Monday revealing that hygiene problems in the group's factories have persisted in the years following the scandal.
As a reminder, around fifty infants were contaminated with salmonellosis after consuming milk from a Lactalis group factory in 2017.
According to Disclose, the hygiene services made an unannounced visit in 2019 to the Craon factory in Mayenne, where the contaminated milk came from in 2017 and which had been authorized to resume marketing in 2018. Two years after the scandal , the investigators would have noted "a deterioration of the hygiene indicators", "the non-respect of all the cleaning procedures" and "the obsolescence of the installations".
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A practice is also pointed out in the article: that of recycling downgraded batches in the production lines.
If this process is authorized, it is necessary to carry out controls, the recycling of the milk which can generate "significant risks of contamination", according to the DGCCRF.
However Lactalis would not carry out “the necessary checks to ensure that there is no contamination of this raw material”, according to a report from the Fraud Repression, which Disclose was able to consult.
During an inspection at the Vitré plant in Ille-et-Vilaine, which produces Lactel milk and President cheeses in particular and which recycles downgraded batches, an official reportedly found that milk awaiting recycling was "stored outside" the plant.
The stocks would be “mixed with the products intended for animal feed”.
He would also have noted the presence of “products not protected by covers”, packaging “open inside closed bins” or lids of milk bottles pierced by “flying pests”.
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Another revelation: the site of Clermont (Oise), would have taken the practice to preserve the milk outside the factory.
Consumers would have alerted about these storage conditions "regardless of the weather conditions (frost, snow, scorching temperatures, etc.)" from the railway line adjoining the establishment's grounds.
“Impunity has no limits”
“Far from having learned the lesson in 2017, Lactalis still does not seem to be concerned about the hygienic conditions in which its products are manufactured.
Impunity has no limit for the Lactalis group which, five years after having had to close a production plant following the hospitalization of several babies, has still not been worried or sanctioned”, reacted Quentin Guillemain, President of an association of families of victims of the salmonella scandal.
“Although extremely serious facts are reported in this article, no pecuniary sanctions or plant closures appear to have been imposed.
Do we still need deaths for the Lactalis group to be sanctioned?
ask the families in a press release.
"It is good because we consider that zero risk does not exist and that health quality is a permanent requirement that we are continuously strengthening our means and our actions", wrote the group's management, responding to the survey. of Disclose.
“We do not dispute that there may be inappropriate individual behavior.
This is why we are committed to identifying and correcting them, in particular through our training plans,” continues the group.