Nestlé has extended its recall of frozen products in North America to include limited production runs of 547-gram Delissio Pizzeria Vintage Tuscan-Style Chicken Pizza and 600-gram Delissio Thin Crispy Crust Chicken Tomato & Spinach Pizza distributed in Canada.
The voluntary action joins a recall of approximately three million boxes of Nestlé brand DeGiorno frozen pizza, Stouffer’s ready meals and Lean Cuisine prepared foods in the USA packed under batch codes 6017525952 and 53625273C1, which may contain small pieces of glass.
“Although our investigation is ongoing, we believe the source of the glass is spinach that was an ingredient common to the products subject to this recall,” Nestlé Canada stated in a press release. “While there have been no consumer complaints in Canada, out of an abundance of caution, we are voluntarily recalling these products due to a small number of consumer complaints in the United States, none of which involved injury.”
“We have informed the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and communicated our decision to recall these products,” continued the press release. “We are immediately informing all of our customers who received these batch codes and arranging for these products to be removed from store shelves.”
“The recall is relatively limited, and I don’t think it will affect the reputation of the brands,” said Laurent Freixe, the executive vice president of Vevey, Switzerland-headquartered Nestlé S.A. in charge of business in the Americas Zone. “This plan shows that our quality system is working efficiently.”
While the dollar cost of the recall has not yet been determined, “it shouldn’t be major,” according to Freixe. “This is an unfortunate situation, but we are solving it.”
John Revell, writing for the MarketWatch news website, reported that the consensus among a number of financial analysts interviewed is that the recall could “slow but not derail the improvement” of Nestlé’s frozen food business in North America, which generated combined sales equivalent to approximately 4.5 billion Swiss francs during 2015.
He quoted Patrik Schwendimann, a Zürcher Kantonalbank analyst, as commenting: “The recovery in frozen food seems under way, but this will have a negative impact in the short term. It will have a small influence on first and second quarter sales, but after a few months I think it will pass.”
