The largest chocolate factory in the world, operated by Barry Callebaut and located in East Flanders, will gradually re-start production in August after a salmonella outbreak resulted in the company halting production.
At the end of June, the company, which produces millions of tonnes of chocolate products every year for customers from pastry chefs to chocolatiers such as Neuhaus, announced it had discovered a salmonella outbreak, and would be halting production. On Friday, it announced it would be ready to restart its business in early August.
"We have removed most of the contaminated products. The 30 trucks of contaminated liquid chocolate have all been taken away from the factory," Barry Callebaut’s spokesperson Korneel Warlop told The Brussels Times.
"Currently they are cleaning up in the factory itself," he added. The restart of the factory can be organised in phases, meaning the entire factory does not have to be cleaned before production can commence. After a few weeks, the factory should be running at full capacity again.
Gradual return
At the beginning, production will start in one part of the factory, and every week, more lines, and thus more production capacity, will become operational.
Warlop explained that the scale of the ongoing cleaning operation is "unprecedented," because the site at Wieze in East Flanders is the largest chocolate factory in the world, with 24 production lines and ten so-called "forming lines."
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"In total, more than 30 kilometres of pipeline have to be cleaned. We also have 120 storage tanks, each with a capacity of 20 tonnes of liquid chocolate, which now have to be emptied, cleaned and disinfected manually," he explained.
The salmonella contamination coriginated from a batch of lecithin, a raw material used as an emulsifier in the food industry, which came from Hungary, as earlier reported by The Brussels Times.
