The discovery of a cockroach inside a frozen pasta packet has led to the recall of hundreds of thousands of frozen pasta meals in Japan on Wednesday, Agence France-Presse reported.
All across Japan, Nissin Frozen Foods was calling for the return of about 750,000 meals sold by supermarkets, a Nissin spokesman said, adding that the recall did not include food being sold internationally.
The company, a unit of instant noodles pioneer Nissin Foods Holdings, is probing "a claim by a customer who spotted something foreign inside a product, and discovered that part of an insect believed to be a cockroach had slipped" into a bag of frozen pasta, it said in a statement.
"We are using frozen vegetables in making the products, and the insect is believed to have been attached to a vegetable, which in turn was presumably sent to our production line," the spokesman said.
An investigation has been launched by the company to figure out how and where the insect might have slipped into the frozen packet from, the spokesman said.
Although the spokesman declined to disclose where the company got the frozen vegetables from, he disclosed that products had been made in one of the company's facilities in Shizuoka prefecture in central Japan, according to AFP.
Meanwhile, Japan is known to hold a good record on food safety, with consumers appreciating the country's use of high standards. But occasional food scares in the past have sometimes proven to be very costly for manufacturers, who can find themselves shunned by shoppers for years.
