Vendor responsible for mislabelling mushrooms at Hyperpure warehouse delisted: Zomato CEO

Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal on Monday said the company has delisted the vendor responsible for putting "incorrect packaging date" on mushroom packets that were found during an FSSAI inspection at the Hyperpure warehouse in Hyderabad.

During the inspection, a Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) team had reportedly found future-dated mushrooms at the warehouse concerned.

Goyal clarified that the incorrect packaging date on the 90 button mushroom packets was due to a "manual typing error on the vendor's side".

"Hello all - just want to clarify that the fssai team noted that 90 packets of button mushrooms had incorrect packaging date - these were already identified by our warehouse team and were rejected during an inward QC.

This is not usual, and was due to a manual typing error on the vendor's side. Still, the concerned vendor has been delisted from our database. At Hyperpure, we have stringent inward guidelines and tech systems that helped our teams to identify this error in time," Goyal said in a post on X.

Zomato Hyperpure is a business-to-business (B2B) platform that supplies restaurants, hotels, and caterers with a wide range of kitchen essentials, including fresh produce, meats, seafood, poultry, gourmet foods, consumables, and kitchen equipment.

Defending Hyperpure's food safety standards, Goyal said the Hyperpure warehouse where the inspection was carried out has achieved an A+ rating.

"I am not sure why just these small number of mushroom packets worth Rs 7,200 (out of the crores of inventory in the warehouse), which were never going to make it to customers, are being talked about the media, while we got an A+ rating.

Maybe some people benefit from the virality which they get at the expense of pulling down the Zomato brand. And maybe we all love to believe the narrative that 'all big business is bad business'," Goyal wrote in the post.