Aryzta gets dopey at US plant

* It's been an eventful week or so for Aryzta, the Swiss-Irish food group run by Owen Killian, the former boss of IAWS.

The company told investors it has agreed to pay €447 million for the upscale French frozen food group, Picard. Investors may take some convincing, as frozen foods is an industry the markets thought Aryzta was keen to exit.

Over at one of its bakery plants in Pennsylvania, however, the company was faced with an altogether different kind of communications issue last week.

Local reporters descended upon Aryzta’s factory in Hazle Township after one of its dough machines spat out a suspected heroin packet onto the production line.

The worker halted the machine, and further suspected heroin packets, as well as “drug paraphernalia”, were discovered inside the machine. State troopers are now investigating, and the company is co-operating fully with the process, it said.

More than 150 workers at the plant who had access to the machine have been interviewed, and about 80 cases of dough that had run through the production line have been destroyed after an inspection by local Department of Agriculture officials. A spokeswoman for the department said there was”no issue with the product based upon this inspection”.

Aryzta also told local reporters it was conducting its own investigation into how the “suspected heroin packet” ended up in the dough. Some dopey individual must be to blame.

* This article was edited on April 8th