More than 3,000 tonnes of Kinder products have been withdrawn from the market because of salmonella fears, a company official told France's Le Parisien on Thursday.
Nicolas Neykov, head of Ferrero France, said the contamination came from a filter in a vat for dairy butter at a factory in Arlon in Belgium. He said the contamination could have been caused by humans or raw materials.
Chocolate products made at the factory in Arlon, southeastern Belgium, were found to contain salmonella, resulting in 150 cases in nine European countries.
In France, eighty-one of these were affecting children under 10 years old.
The closure of the factory and health concerns was a blow to Italian confectionery giant Ferrero, which was at the height of the Easter holiday season when its Kinder chocolates are sought-after supermarket buys.
Neykov said it was the biggest removal of products in the last 20 years.
The company hoped to be able to start up the factory again, with 50 percent of health and safety inspections to be carried out by an approved external laboratory in the future, instead of the previous system of only internal reviews.
He said that we asked for a reopening from June 13 to relaunch production as soon as possible.