“Pizza is dead. Buitoni pizzas are screwed. But we need another product and we are going to fight with all the elected officials, ”says determined Frédéric Bricout (LIOT), the mayor of Caudry. Almost a year after the Buitoni pizza scandal, contaminated by the E.Coli bacteria, the factory that produced the products is again threatened with closure. Two children had died and dozens of people were poisoned by E.Coli in April 2022. The group had briefly reopened the cooked dough lines that were not affected by E.Coli at the end of 2022, but it is now forced to close the factory again for lack of sales.
Employees and politicians denounce the inaction of Nestlé, the group that owns Buitoni. They demonstrated to express their concern. “It is not the employees who are at fault for everything that is happening. So they have to take responsibility,” explains Caroline, an employee. “Today, the employees are in no way responsible for what happened, denounces the mayor of Caudry. The judicial inquiry is in the process of proving it and therefore Nestlé must assume, Nestlé must keep its jobs in Caudry, Nestlé must allocate another production here, ”adds the elected official.