The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is investigating milk sold from the Farmers Dairy facility in Bedford.
The CFIA has received three complaints, and recommends that consumers call their doctor if they think they’ve become sick from consuming a food product.
“Food safety investigations are ongoing and additional information is not available at this time,” the CFIA said via email.
“However, when dealing with potentially unsafe food, the CFIA acts as quickly as possible to collect information and make decisions on follow-up actions, including possible recall of the product.”
A thread on the social media channel Reddit has 63 comments, many about four-litre jugs of Farmers milk with a “chemical” taste.
Commenters used terms like “disgusting taste” and “tastes like chlorine.”
• “Kinda chlorine-like smell to it and a bit of a funny taste.”
• “I noticed today that the milk tasted like plastic. Nasty.”
• “Drank some at my parents and we all agreed and threw it out. Came back to Halifax, bought a carton, threw it out again. Both were 4L 1%, and tasted like ashes were mixed in with it. Disgusting. Different brand time!”
One report had numerous customers returning milk to the Sobeys store in Spryfield in particular. Store manager Chris Macauley was prevented by corporate superiors from answering questions, referring them to national media contact Jacquelin Corrado.
“We take any product concerns seriously and we are doing an internal review to look into these returns. There have been no new complaints since the weekend,” Corrado said from the airport in Montreal. She didn’t know how many jugs of milk were returned or whether the problem was limited to the Halifax area.
The media relations staff at Loblaws, parent of Atlantic Superstore, didn’t return a call.
A phone call to Farmers Dairy was referred to the parent company in Quebec. Veronique Boileau, vice-president of communications for Agropur, also was unable to say how much milk was bad.
“What I can say is there were reports of off flavours made, related to Farmers milk, and I can confirm it is an isolated event. We are still investigating the matter to find the exact cause,” Boileau said.
“There are no reports of a health risk associated with consumption of this product, and there is no recall.
“We received some complaints, and we are following the situation very closely. We apologize to consumers for any inconvenience.”
