A DAY after Mumbai police, investigating the ‘flesh found in ice-cream case’, said they had traced the worker in Indapur’s Fortune Dairy Industries who had met with an accident and had lost part of his finger, the ice cream company directors have refuted the claim. They said none of their workers had met with any such accident and that they would soon make public the ‘concrete proof’ they have.
On June 12, 26-year-old Brandon Ferrao, a Mumbai based doctor, filed a complaint with Malad police station when he found a piece of flesh with a nail in a Yummo’s butterscotch ice cream (whose parent company is Walko QSR Company) which he had ordered via delivery app Zepto. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) had started an inspection of the Indapur unit of Fortune Dairy Industries, Walko’s third party manufacturer and had issued an order for production to be stopped.
Mumbai police had, on Wednesday, identified the injured worker as Omkar Pote (24) who hails from Satara and is employed in the factory of Fortune Dairy Industries. Police said the worker admitted that on May 11 his finger was cut off when he was working at the scotch crushing machine. Police said they had sent his sample to the Forensic Sciences Lab to be matched with the piece of flesh found in the ice cream.
Sachin Jadhav, one of the directors of Fortune Dairy Industries, said, “I want to assert that none of our staffers suffered any injury in which a finger was severed. We have earlier said this is an attempt to malign the image of the Yummo brand.”
Another director of the firm, Manoj Tupe, said, “There is a major discrepancy in the batch number of the ice cream mentioned in the police FIR and the batch numbers produced in our factory. They don’t match. Police have questioned several of our employees and are looking at Pote with baseless suspicion. We know for a fact that Pote’s injury is not of the nature which could lead to severing of the finger. We have come to know that even doctors who examined him have said his injury is inconsistent with the claims. We will be holding a press conference in two days in which we will verify with concrete proof to people that these claims are false.”
The Indian Express has reported earlier, quoting company officials, that there are around 50 skilled workers and 150-160 unskilled workers employed at the facility, along with a dozen supervisors and managerial staff. Officials had said that Fortune Dairy Industries started the manufacturing unit in April-May 2020. The company received between one to two lakh litres of milk everyday from producers in Pune, Solapur and districts nearby, before its operations were stopped by FSSAI. The company, whose main products are butter and skimmed milk powders, had started manufacturing ice cream for other vendors in 2023, which makes for around five per cent of its total business, officials had said.
Click here to join Express Pune WhatsApp channel and get a curated list of our stories
