Contaminated cooking oil in airline meals? Huashan Flight Kitchen: Our homemade products don’t use lard

▲ Huashan Flight Kitchen issues a stern statement regarding the contaminated cooking oil scandal involving its in-flight meals. (Photo/Archive, photo by reporter Hsiao Wan-ning)

By Chen Tzu-yin / Staff reporter

The substandard cooking oil scandal continues to escalate. It was recently reported that Huashan Flight Kitchen, which supplies in-flight meals for China Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Mandarin Airlines, used lard-based “Zhengyi fragrant lard” in its meal ingredients, leading to a product recall. In response, Huashan Flight Kitchen issued a statement this afternoon (14th), emphasizing that its homemade products do not use lard and asserting that media reports have damaged the company’s reputation.

The full text of Huashan Flight Kitchen’s statement is as follows:

Huashan Flight Kitchen issues a stern statement regarding certain media headlines claiming the company used substandard oil, which have already harmed its reputation.

Huashan Flight Kitchen emphasizes,that none of its homemade products use lard, and no “Zhengyi” brand related oils are used within its facilities.. Cooking oils used in meal preparation are all plant-based, while baked goods use butter imported from New Zealand and Australia. However, due to misleading reporting by some media outlets recently, consumer confidence has been affected, impacting our homemade products and causing both reputational and tangible losses.

Huashan Flight Kitchen stated that since the outbreak of the Ting Hsin oil scandal, the company has required all external suppliers to provide documentation on the oils they use, which is then archived for reference. Therefore, immediately after the Zhengyi oil incident broke out on the afternoon of October 8, Huashan Flight Kitchen conducted an internal review of all externally sourced items and discovered that three products — “shredded radish pastry,” “black pepper pastry,” and “garlic crisps” — involved the use of “Zhengyi” lard. These were promptly preventive-recalled, removed from all flights, and the issue was voluntarily reported to the Taoyuan County Health Bureau. The Taoyuan County Health Bureau subsequently notified the New Taipei City Health Bureau, where these three products are under jurisdiction, to handle the matter. Additionally, the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s list of self-recalled products has also removed Huashan Flight Kitchen to prevent consumers from mistakenly believing these three products were homemade by Huashan.

Moving forward, Huashan Flight Kitchen will continue to strictly monitor all products to ensure the safety and reliability of every item provided to airlines and individual consumers.