Melamine in Food

Our company specialise in supplying ingredients to 3 in 1 coffee, non dairy creamer and cereal.  A customer called to demand a guarantee that our ingredients, mainly instant coffee powder and non dairy creamer, were not sourced from China. She also wanted to know what is the allowable limit for melamine in food set by AVA Singapore. The answer is the allowable melamine limit set by AVA is 5ppm, or 5 part per million.

Our creamer supplier from Holland  has in the past weeks issued declaration that they do not source any ingredients from China. Not satisfied with the declaration, our customer demanded us to send non dairy creamer samples to a reputable laboratory for testing. We did as the customer demand and the result was negative ( i.e. melamine was not detected at the level of 0.05ppm. We even went one step further to test the customer’s 3 in 1 coffee, and again melamine was not detected.

As for instant coffee powder, it is made with just pure coffee beans, and high protein in not a what buyers are looking, Therefore, it can safely be consumed with the knowledge that it is free from melamine.

The dust has more or less settled down on the melamine issue. Let’s hope that history will not repeat itself. Touch wood.

Changi-Suvarnabhumi Traffic

Last week my planned four nation business trip was severely disrupted. I was to be traveling to Bangkok and Yangon last Thursday to visit my instant coffee customers. The trips were disrupted due to Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport. I then tried to travel to Yangon from Changi Airport, but found all flights to and fro from Yangon were full till December 2oth. Wow, this must be the peak season Yangon travellers.

Meanwhile, some interested facts were uncovered while trying to salvage my four nation trip (Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangkok, and Yangon) originally planned. There are 303 flights a week between Singapore and Bangkok . 2.29 million passengers plied this route in the first ten month of 2008. Whilst 2.1 million and 1.5 million passengers were flying Singapore-Jakarta and Singapore-KL respectively.

According to data compliled by Airport of Thailand, Changi sent 2.9 million passangers to Bangkok.  Changi Airport was the top contributors to Suvarnabhumi Airport. I wonder how much business Changi stands to lose as a result of last week’s disruption. For me, I just hope to be back to Bangkok as soon as the situation allows. Though, my customers and I can communicate via emails and telephone calls, nothing can replace personal touch.