The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration Control, NAFDAC, has issued a strong warning about consuming unbranded Cereals on the Open market.
This came in a statement from the Director General, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye at the Agency’s Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Directorate Stakeholder’s Engagement with Food Sector Operators in Lagos
She insisted that “When a product is not certified by NAFDAC, it is not advisable that anybody consume it. The unbranded products in the market do not have a NAFDAC registration/marketing authorization number.”
She also cautioned against food manufacturing, saying that it would no longer accept poorly destroyed , expired products sneaking into the market through scavengers at the waste dump site, thereby endangering the lives of innocent consumers, particularly, children.
She emphasised that all the products that had gone through the regulatory processes were packaged with NAFDAC registration numbers on them.
‘’We cannot speak to the safety of unbranded food in the open market. We do not know where they have come from. We don’t know anything about the expiry date. We cannot trace,” she said.
Speaking on the success story of the agency , she added that in 2021 and 2022, the Agency carried out a lot of investigation and enforcement activities on unbranded cereals, leading to the arrest of some people who were selling online in Onitsha and bringing them to Lagos.
She argued that some industries were also complicit in this, saying, “we found out that some of the cereals were picked up from dump sites in Agbara.”
Adeyeye said, “If you want to dispose of some bad or expired products, you are supposed to destroy them by the NAFDAC Investigation and Enforcement Directorate, not by the company directly through waste disposal authorities. It will always get to scavengers who will sell it back to the market.”
