Couple Busted Making Fake Salt in Guangzhou

By Bailey Hu, June 21, 2017

Will the fake food scandals (and the fake fake food scandals) never end? After moldy winter melon and formaldehyde-enhanced pig blood, the latest scandal to hit the PRD is fake 'industrial salt.'

On June 6, police busted a husband-and-wife salt-selling operation in Guangzhou's Baiyun District, according to Southcn.com. The couple was reportedly buying industrial salt in bulk, repackaging it as 'Yueyan'-brand iodized table salt and selling the final product both wholesale and retail.

Baiyun District police seized the couple, who are now being detained, and confiscated close to a ton of repackaged fake salt, found stored in 48 cases. In the rooms where the husband-wife team had worked, police also found 1.5 additional tons of industrial salt, plus the equipment and packaging the couple had been using.

The scene of the crime was a lone building in Nanling Village, Baiyun. The man, surnamed Wang, and his wife had been living and working out of two rented rooms there for the last year. Their process was simple: buy industrial salt wholesale at the low rate of RMB500 a ton, repackage it into 'Yueyan' bags at an additional cost of RMB100, and sell it on the market for around RMB1,500 per ton, about half the normal retail rate.

According to police, the couple's production rate was relatively high. They usually shipped salt out soon after making it, so their product wasn't stored in their workshop for long. Prior to the bust, police, with the help of staff from the local salt industry, identified and confiscated 620 kilograms of fake salt being sold in farmers' markets or grain and oil wholesale markets in the surrounding area.

The confiscated salt, and a packaging machine

The couple's case is still under investigation.

The industrial salt substitute they were using doesn't contain iodine, and if eaten long-term could lead to health problems. There's also the matter of sanitation; in the unregulated environment of the couple's workshop, contaminants may have entered the salt during the process of packaging.

Worried that you may have fake salt at home? It's actually easy to tell the difference, according to Deng Jieping, vice captain of the Baiyun Food and Drug Ring Investigation Team. First, scan the QR code on the back: starting in March of this year in Guangzhou, all Yueyan products made by Guangdong Province Salt Industry Group Co., Ltd., are required to have one.

Enter the last four digits of the code circled above and you should be directed to a link where you can check details about the product, including where it was produced.

Other tell-tale signs of fake salt: creases on the sides of the bag, and blurry or indistinct anti-counterfeit labels and production dates.

The creased bag on the right is fake