European Interest

Lower quality food in Poland

Flickr/Michael Coghlan/CC BY-SA 2.0

Looks like Polish consumers are getting a bad deal. Poland’s Central Auditing Office (NIK) has reported that multinational food companies sell products of lower quality and with different ingredients than on Western markets.

The office’s head, Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, told the Rzeczpospolita daily newspaper: “Tests carried out on products available on Polish and Western European markets have shown dual food quality.”

As reported by Radio Poland, Kwiatkowski also said that further intensive inspections and awareness campaigns are needed as consumers are largely oblivious to the problem.

A total of 48,000 inspections were carried out between 2014 and 2017 by the provincial offices of the Polish Trading Standards Association (IH), which has been audited by NIK.

The Central Auditing Office said: “It emerged that 38% of the tested product batches from nearly half of the inspected shops failed to meet national norms and EU directives”.

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