Russia's consumer protection watchdog has shut down a bakery in the Saratov region, the agency said Tuesday, after a local woman reported finding the severed head of a dead rat in a loaf of bread.
The regional branch of the Rospotrebnadzor watchdog suspended the work of the local Struzhkin Bread Factory due to the “unsatisfactory sanitary and technical condition of the factory's spaces, the possibility for rodents to penetrate an array of manufacturing and storage facilities,” the agency said in an online statement.
The announcement came after a Saratov residents' online group on Russia's Vkontakte social network published a letter and photographs submitted by a local woman, detailing her discovery of a dead rodent's head.
“I wanted to make a cheese sandwich, but the [bread] producer, exceeding all my expectations, insistently offered me a sandwich with meat: After slicing the loaf, to my horror and disgust I found a fragment of a rat carcass there,” the woman wrote.
“Bits of fur and the size of the piece of 'meat' leave not doubt that this was definitely a rat,” she wrote. “It's unclear how the manufacturer of this bread product failed to notice such a huge serving of rat meat. And the question remains where the rest of the body parts of this unfortunate animal are.”
The consumer protection watchdog said in its statement an investigation into the bread factory was still under way.
