Mushrooms of Paris stamped blue, white and red, actually came from Poland, hundreds of kilometers away. Carrefour, Leclerc, Lidl or Casino... Thirteen retail groups were fooled by a single company. Behind this deception is Lou Vegetables, which owns mushroom farms in Poilley, Ille-et-Vilaine. She was sentenced Tuesday at the criminal court of Rennes, for deception and complicity in deception. The company thus receives three fines for a total amount of 744,000 euros.
The suspicions began to appear in December 2020, during a control of the repression of fraud. Investigators then spotted trays of mushrooms labeled "origin France" in trucks coming from Poland. Dozens of deliveries would have passed between March 1, 2019 and December 14, 2020. For the head of the company, this is "a mistake", while adding that demand increased sharply as the holidays approached.
For the Prosecutor's Office, which requested a fine of 1.5 million euros, "the company responded to increasingly important orders, from increasingly reputable brands", without having "the production tools" sufficient to meet them. For his part, Lou Légumes has appealed, according to Actu. The lawyers of the family business were surprised that no analysis had been carried out to determine the true origin of the mushrooms.