Mumbai: Multinational food giant Nestle India announced here on Friday that 100 percent of the samples tested in three laboratories were found clear and Maggi noodles are safe.
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The state’s Bombay High Court ruled in August to lift the ban, but mandated new tests to decide if Nestle could manufacture Maggi for sale in India again. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India said at the time that samples tested by its labs found that Maggi contained lead higher than the permissible limit.
Nestle India had challenged the ban by FSSAI in the Bombay High Court.
Shares of Nestle India surged almost 6 per cent on the BSE today, adding Rs 3,346 crore to its market valuation. “When the product returns to the market, Nestle will have to revise its contracts with the former brand ambassadors if they are willing to come onboard”, one executive said.
The company, which had earlier said it was planning to bring back the Maggi noodles in the market by this year end, further said that it is committed to reintroducing Maggi noodles “at the earliest”.
The local unit of the Swiss company stopped all forms of advertising for the brand in June after the product was pulled out of retail.
Nestle conducted about 3,500 tests representing 200 million packs in national and worldwide accredited laboratories in the past few months and all reports were clear. India’s Maggi noodle recall continued to have a significant impact on growth in the South Asia Region, Nestle said.
This got the Indian government’s Consumer Affairs Department involved. Nestle is also directed to file a list of batch numbers of samples that have already been sent to the lab for analysis as per the order of the Bombay High Court. The packages cleared all the tests, the company says.
For the full year, Nestle now projects organic growth of around 4.5 percent, while the previous growth view was 5 percent.
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Maggi noodles were subject to a recall in India over safety concerns. Be a youngster or an adult, people just swooped on the immensely popular 2-minute Maggi Noodles.
