Sinograin edible oil removed from Taobao.com as Chinese netizens demand investigation into suspected contamination

Workers process edible oil at a factory in Boxing County, east China’s Shandong Province, Jan. 8, 2024. Photo: cnsphoto

Sinograin’s edible oil products were removed from Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao Tuesday morning, as the food company is embroiled in a food safety scandal of “contaminated transportation” of food and chemical liquids in the same vehicles, and some Chinese netizens have called for a boycott of the products.

As of Tuesday morning, only one product from Jinding, the edible oil brand owned by China Grain Reserves Group (Sinograin), remained online, while several other products have disappeared from Taobao.

A store representative told the Global Times that “all products on sale meet national food safety standards.”

Jinding’s edible oil products remain on sale on JD.com, another major shopping portal in China.

Additionally, the sale of edible oil products of Hopefull Grain and Oil, the other company allegedly involved in the scandal, continued on Tuesday on both e-commerce platforms.

On July 2, a report in the Beijing News revealed that the mixed transportation of food and liquid chemicals in the same vehicles, without cleaning in between, had become an “open secret” in the tanker industry.

In order to reduce costs, many operators do not clean tanks and edible oil producers do not check tanks according to regulations, resulting in chemical residues and contamination of the edible oil.

The report mentions both companies.

Langfang’s market supervision administration said Tuesday that the local government is investigating the reported case and will release the results once the investigation is completed, Yicai reported.

Sinograin said Saturday it had launched a large-scale internal inspection following the report, promising severe punishment if any wrongdoing was found. Hopefull Grain and Oil responded that the tankers were not owned by the company and that Hopefull brand edible oil “had no quality issues,” the Economic View newspaper reported Monday.

Chinese netizens, however, are skeptical of the company’s statement, with some calling for a boycott of its products. One netizen wrote on Sina Weibo: “The companies should be held responsible, as they did not check whether these tankers met the requirements for transporting edible oil.”

The main component of coal oil is hydrocarbon, which contains unsaturated hydrocarbons, sulfide and other elements that will cause poisoning to the human body if a person uses the oil for a long time, Zhu Yi, an associate professor of food safety and nutrition at China Agricultural University in Beijing, told the Global Times on Tuesday.