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The discovery of a mouse head inside a packet of the popular shrimp-flavored snack Sae-u-ggang manufactured by Nongshim illustrates the consequences awaiting a food maker that deceives its customers. Following the announcement by the Korea Food and Drug Administration on Monday, large discount stores and neighborhood supermarkets pulled the product off their shelves. The announcement has even put people off eating snacks made by other food makers.
The reason for this aversion is Nongshim's dishonest style of doing business, by attempting to hide the discovery of the mouse head after a customer complained. Since it first hit the market in 1971, Sae-u-ggang has become a household name in Korea with accumulated sales of 5.7 billion packs. The company sells W60 billion (US$1=W1,010) worth of the product each year even today. After a woman in Cheongwon, North Chungcheong Province complained that she discovered a 1.6-cm object shaped like the head of a mouse in a packet of Sae-u-ggang on Feb. 19, Nongshim, whose business has flourished on the popularity of its products, is said to have tried to hush the customer by sending her three boxes of instant noodles. The company took the object away, saying it would analyze it, and ground it up into powder.
Because of Nongshim's dishonesty, 140,000 boxes of Sae-u-ggang that were produced at the same time as the one containing the mouse-head-like object were sold in stores. It's sickening to think about where the body of the mouse might be. An honest food maker would have immediately halted its assembly lines to open an investigation after such a complaint, and recalled all of the offending products from store shelves. The fact that Nongshim continued to sell Sae-u-ggang while ignoring the complaint shows just how much it cares about the health of its customers.
Nongshim is said to have acknowledged the fact that something burnt was found in its product, but could not verify the identity of that object. But the KFDA has announced that the object must be a mouse head based on photographic and microscopic analyses, and Nongshim has not refuted this.
The packet of Sae-u-ggang containing the object was produced for sale in karaoke halls and the dough used to make the snack was made at a factory in China and imported into Korea. A Japanese kimchi maker that has a production plant in China employs 150 workers solely devoted to inspecting the ingredients and heavy metals found in soil samples at Chinese vegetable farms. Another Japanese company, which had an 86 percent share of the country's meat processing market, went bankrupt in just a month after it was caught deceiving its customers by selling imported beef as home-grown. Which path will Nonghsim follow?
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