The scandal involving Fujiya Company’s use of expired milk in thousands of cream puffs last year just keeps getting worse:

Officials of the Tokyo-based confectioner said Thursday that 113 chou rolls produced last June at its Saitama Prefecture factory were delivered to Fujiya cake and pastry outlets even though they contained dangerously high levels of bacteria.

The readings were 10 times the level permissible under the Food Sanitation Law.

They also said the Niiza city factory used processed apple past its use date to manufacture hundreds of apple pies.

Rats, they added, had also been a problem.

As many as 50 of the disease-carrying vermin were caught in traps at the factory in a single month in 2004.

No need to be shocked, since Fujiya had highly scientific methods to determine the safety of milk used in its products:

Officials said the employee responsible, who was re-employed after his retirement, judged that the milk was still fit for use, even though it had expired a day earlier.

The man told an in-house investigation, “I thought that, even if milk passed its expiry date, I was able to confirm its quality by checking its color, smell and taste.”

Hiroki Sekiguchi, head of Fujiya’s production department, said, “As the man was a veteran, he made light of our in-house rules.”

While the Niiza city factory prohibits the disposal of milk past its expiry dates into the main drainage system to promote environmental protection, it has not designated any concrete rules on getting rid of old milk.

In addition, there was no safety manual at the factory. Clearly without a safety manual it was impossible for employees to know that expired food could be unsafe to eat!

Executives at Fujiya knew about the use of expired ingredients back in November. Their response is a grand example of corporate responsbility:

Fujiya executives were notified that old milk was being used in November, but chose not to make any public disclosure.

Instead, a notice was distributed to certain employees.

It read in part, “In recent years, many corporate scandals related to compliance have resulted from whistle-blowing. If the use of milk that has passed its expiry date is revealed to the media, it is inevitable our firm will become another Snow Brand Milk Products Co.” [ Snow Brand was dissolved following a 2000 scandal in which more than 13,000 people were sickened after consuming dairy products the company produced using contaminated milk.]

By which I mean, responsibility to keep you and your buddies safe, while not giving a damn about the consumers. Now that the truth about their business practices has been revealed, Fujiya has shut down all of its store locations and factories while it attempts to implement a new form of quality control. They definately won’t be getting any of my business when they open again…