ETIQUETTE BLOG

One of the Pot Noodle variants affected - the "pot snacks" are claimed by Unilever to be the UK's biggest-selling such product.

Unilever was forced on April 13 to recall five varieties of its big-selling Pot Noodle snacks after reports that cracks had been found in a small number of the plastic containers during manual and automatic inspect at the company's Crumlin filling plant near Caerphilly in Wales.

The brand owener, which claims an 80% share of the UK pot snack maret with Pot Noodles, said only single packs, and not containers sold in four-packs, where believe to have been affected. The recall, in national newspapers, asked consumers to retrun any of the five variants with "best before" dates and of ""end of November and end of December 2007" straight to Unilever. A special telephone hotline was set up.

Spokesman Duncan Bogie said that as soon as cracks werefound in the base and sidewalls of a small number of packs coming off the production line it was decided to cease production.

He explained: "We and our packaging supplier believe the cracks were a result of a switch from self-adhesive labelled pots to new in-mould lablled sealed containers. They were among the very first of the new type and the manufacturer has already taken successful remedia action."

"We believe under 100 packs actually dispatched may have been affected and have had no customer reports or problems; the recall was purely for saftey."

The pots are injection moulded by Plastic System Packaging in Central France, a specialist in-mould labelled containers. A spokesman said there were several portential factors thatcould have causedthe cracking, which were being "fully investigated"