Foodstuff, Lithuania, Markets and Companies, Retail

Ernesta Dapkiene, spokeswoman for Maxima, told LETA/BNS the chain halted the sale of all meat on Feb 7 and then destroyed almost 160 tons of meat, suffering a loss of around 0.5 mln euros.

"The losses also include workers' working time and the price of meat, lost revenue and the costs of destroying the meat," Dapkiene told.

In her words, the decision to destroy meat was made because positive test results were received from different production and storage facilities.

"Upon receipt of the results of samples taken from different places and at different times, in this case Biovela's samples which showed microbiological contamination, we decided to preventively remove fresh meat and marinated products from our all stores, event where samples were not taken," Dapkiene said.

In her words, the company's quality specialists advised to destroy all meat as contaminated meat could have had contact with other meat during the production of sausages or marinated meat.

It was the first such incident in Maxima's history as well as the whole of Lithuania, Dapkiene noted.

Biovela said earlier on Tuesday that possibly contaminated meat entered only the Maxima retail chain.